Sharing Money

Crypto makes it easier for groups of people to share money.

This seems trivial, but is surprisingly difficult in the current financial system. For example, consider renting an Airbnb with friends. One person is expected to put down their credit card and request money from everyone else. There's no way to easily pool the money without giving someone control.

If it were easier to share money, we'd see more people doing it. Today, families and businesses often pool money, but not friends, colleagues, or communities. But there's no reason why this can't change.

A recent upgrade to Ethereum called smart accounts make this process much easier.

Smart Accounts Make It Easier To Share Money

Smart accounts are like bank accounts with simple rules like:

• Bob and Alice can both withdraw funds
• Bob can only withdraw $10 per day
• Alice can withdraw money, but only if Bob approves it
• Either Bob or Alice can withdraw any amount up to $1,000

Instead of needing to visit a bank branch to request a joint account, smart accounts allow you to set up a shared account with anyone in the world in seconds. This is a significant innovation that will have far-reaching effects on how groups share money.

I'm particularly excited about two products in this space: Safe and Splits.

Safe

Safe is the category leader and enterprise solution for shared wallets (a.k.a. multisigs). I've been using Safe for years to manage finances at Bright Moments, including complicated actions like swapping tokens, managing an NFT treasury, and holding funds in escrow.

Safe allows you to set up a basic shared account with simple rules for releasing funds. Since Safe is also a protocol, you can rely on its battle-tested infrastructure while using other products like Smol, which extends Safe’s technology to deploy a multisig across multiple chains at once.

Splits

Splits is a platform for managing onchain payments. Its basic product is a suite of one-click deployable smart contracts for sharing revenue—for example, enabling an artist and a platform to share royalties from the sales of a creative product.

Recently, they have started developing a product for teams that extends this functionality. By combining smart accounts with passkeys, they’ve reduced the barrier to creating a shared wallet by abstracting away the need for an existing self-custody cryptocurrency wallet.

Smart accounts are breaking down barriers to sharing money. By making it easier for anyone to pool and manage funds securely and transparently, products like Safe and Splits are paving the way for new forms of economic cooperation.

As these tools become more user-friendly and widely adopted, we can expect to see a significant shift in how groups—big and small—handle their finances.