Safle Gains New Leadership, Funding to Grow Cross-Chain Identity Solution

Safle, a self-sovereign identity protocol and non-custodial wallet, has overhauled its leadership and raised funds at a valuation of $77 million.

Apoorv Shankar, who has been building related products since 2013, now leads technology and product vision at Safle, while Shikha Mehra, who heads a Web3 consulting firm, now presides over the strategy and governance arm at Safle, the company said in a Sunday (July 7) press release.

Mehra said in the release that the Safle team has proven to be resilient in times of crisis.

“Even in the depth of the bear market, they have maintained a clear vision of what they wanted to bring to Web3: the best self-sovereign cross-chain identity solution out there,” Mehra said. “‘Keep building’ may be a common blockchain trope, but it fully applies to Safle — and I am really proud and excited to be leading the team on the next stage of this journey.”

With the additional private funding the company secured from investors based in Ireland through equity sales, Safle will accelerate its expansion plans, including listings on centralized exchanges, according to the release.

Currently, the protocol’s multichain identity wallet and SafleID allow users to manage assets on more than 10 blockchains through a single human-readable username, the release said.

Safle has expanded its in-house development team over the past few months and will work on adding new features that include artificial intelligence (AI), on-chain identity (SSI) and seamless pseudonymous onboarding, the release said.

The team is also working on new integrations, including bitcoin’s L2 ecosystem; enhanced DeFi support, including a web portfolio viewer, unified portal for connecting to dApps, and in-wall access; cross-chain features like swaps, bridging and transactions; and user experience (UX) improvements like advanced recovery options and a Wallet Connect integration, per the release.

In an earlier product launch in this space, Block said in December 2023 that it launched its self-custody bitcoin wallet Bitkey in 95 countries, aiming to widen access to self-custody.

On Friday (July 5), Switzerland-based cryptocurrency wallet maker Tangem AD launched a payments partnership with Visa, resulting in a Visa payments card combined with a hardware wallet that lets Tangem users make payments using their crypto or stablecoin balances at merchants that accept Visa.