Squads Labs is a technology company that builds tools to enable efficient economic activity onchain. Our mission is to grow the onchain economy by developing smart account technology and products that make it easy for businesses, teams and individuals to securely transact, manage and own digital assets.
In 2021, we formed the company to build tools that allow onchain organizations to manage assets and collectively make decisions.
At the time, we thought that all onchain organizations could and should be DAOs - decentralized communities leveraging onchain infrastructure to come together and govern digital assets and protocols. However, we quickly discovered that if you make transactions cheaper and faster - more traditional (centralized) organizations start to explore how to use blockchains for their operations as well.
This discovery led to our focus on smart account technology and full-stack products for teams and enterprises building their businesses on Solana, a group that inevitably required a solution to manage their treasury (raised funds, grants, revenue) and developer (programs, validators) assets.
For our initial customers, the primary use of smart accounts and the Squads platform was multisignature capabilities for managing program upgrades. Solana programs are upgradeable by default and securely handling program upgrade authority is a top priority for any serious enterprise. Our early success came from solving this core problem by combining a well-designed program upgrade experience (reminiscent of traditional SaaS) with secure smart account technology.
As confidence in the security of our smart accounts grew and our product experience further improved, more and more Solana businesses started shifting their operations onchain, including traditional functions previously managed on legacy financial rails - like employee and contractor payroll. Fast forward to today, our smart accounts are the standard for the SVM ecosystem, securing over $10 billion in value. Our products are used by all the major enterprises active in Solana today managing a wide variety of onchain assets such as programs, treasuries, tokens and validators.
Our experience led to several core beliefs that we always go back to when making strategic decisions and roadmap planning:
We are betting on a future where an ever-increasing amount of productive economic activity happens onchain. In other words, we believe that the onchain economy will and should grow. We want to accelerate that future and make it happen faster.
Our mission is to grow the onchain economy.
We believe we can achieve that by building products and services that make it easy and intuitive for enterprises and individuals to transact, manage and own digital assets.
We will grow the onchain economy by building products and services that
An integral part in achieving this mission was, and will continue to be, the smart account technology (Squads Protocol) that we have been developing for the SVM since 2021 and will continue to advance in the years to come.
Blockchains are public ledgers, and all ledgers need an account structure to store data. Traditional accounts used for owning, managing and transacting digital assets are:
We call these traditional accounts - light accounts. You have used a light account when interacting with Phantom, Backpack, Metamask or any other traditional crypto wallet.
These light accounts can become programmable by leveraging account abstraction, which decouples the object holding your tokens (the account) from the object authorized to move these tokens (the private key). With account abstraction, every account can be programmed and empowered with customized logic to validate and execute transactions. We call these programmable accounts - smart accounts.
Here’s a concise definition of smart accounts: "a configurable onchain account governed by code," and a more nuanced one: “(i) a programmable user account; which (ii) contains the necessary logic to securely custody and manage digital assets; and (iii) introduces various UX improvements such as multi-signature, recoverability, lack of seed phrase and gas abstraction.”
Think of conventional accounts like basic ledgers – they can store and transfer assets, but lack expression. Smart accounts add a layer of intelligence, allowing developers to set parameters and define rules and logic that will govern how you or anyone else can interact with the digital assets in the account.
We believe smart accounts will be the technology powering the vast majority of onchain economic activity allowing users to secure their digital wealth and programmatically define how they interact with blockchain ecosystems. A world where users don’t pay gas or any other infrastructure costs when interacting with apps on blockchains will be made possible by smart accounts, while light accounts will remain valuable entry points for seamless onboarding and app interactions.
Our smart account technology is specifically designed for the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) because we believe scale and performance are necessary to migrate significant economic activity onchain. Solana aims to achieve scale by tightly coupling highly optimized software with performant hardware to offer extremely low latency, high throughput and sub-cent fees. Most importantly, Solana prioritizes this level of performance while maintaining a decentralized network with thousands of nodes. This approach and the idea of scaling the base layer to its limits before turning to modularity and rollups greatly resonates with us, hence we remain committed to advancing the SVM ecosystem with our products and technology.
We offer three unique products that connect a specific type of user with the same piece of technology (smart account) in a way that is most intuitive for them. This product suite includes Squads (enterprises), Fuse (individuals) and Otacon (developers).
Three products, multiple use cases, one technology.
Squads is an enterprise platform that enables businesses to run their operations onchain. With Squads, businesses can deploy a smart account, configure it to satisfy their security and organizational requirements, and then use it to manage a wide range of onchain assets such as treasury, program upgrade authorities, admin keys, tokens and validators. With Squads, our goal is to bring a traditional SaaS-like product experience to onchain asset management in a way that feels familiar and intuitive to both traditional and crypto-native businesses.
Fuse is the modern digital savings account for individuals. By abstracting away seed phrases, and offering wallet recovery and 2FA capabilities, Fuse unlocks enterprise-level security for your personal custody setup. Our mission with Fuse is to make the choice of storing your personal digital wealth onchain - an easy one.
Fuse is a product built on Squads Protocol leveraging Otacon toolkit. We are particularly excited about building Fuse because it allows us to combine smart account technology with primitives like MPC, passkeys and Apple secure enclave to deliver a unique wallet experience which does not make UX or security tradeoffs.
Otacon is our toolkit for smart account development, empowering developers to tap into the full potential of smart accounts. We provide a comprehensive suite of SDKs, documentation, and APIs designed to streamline interactions with Squads Protocol. These tools are accompanied by a real-time dashboard and analytics for valuable insights and smart account management at scale. We are building Otacon so that developers can leverage Squads Protocol with minimal friction and focus on building their products.
We are a team with diverse backgrounds in tech, law, and finance, actively building in crypto full-time since 2021. While each of us is unique, we all share a deep appreciation for the ethos of crypto and a love for meticulously designed products. Our team members are based in the US, Europe, UAE, and parts of Asia, with permanent company hubs being established in Paris and Dubai.
