Safe, the governance token behind the decentralized finance custodian Safe Protocol, has now become transferable. "The Safe token contract is officially unpaused and SAFE is transferable," the Safe Governance X.com accounted posted on Tuesday.

Since the unlock, the token's price declined by over 19% and was changing hands for $2.8 at 6 a.m. ET. According to Coingecko data, the Safe's fully diluted valuation stands at over $2.8 billion. The token has a maximum supply of one billion, with a current circulating supply of 427 million. 

Tokens had been locked for almost two years

The DAO’s tokens had been locked for almost two years since their launch via an airdrop in October 2022.

Speaking to The Block, a Safe spokesperson described the reasons for the governance token's lengthy frozen period before its unlocking. "The decision to make SAFE tokens transferable, along with the process of reaching this point, was guided by SafeDAO governance," the spokesperson said. "After the community decided against transferability at the end of 2022, SafeDAO aligned on five milestones to be passed to re-issue a vote on transferability."

These five milestones were described as being discussed in-depth over the last year until a DAO voting period ended on April 15, when over 99% of participants accepted the proposal to unpause the Safe token contract and enable transferability. "⁠Token transferability is a significant event, and responsibilities should be with the DAO," the spokesperson added. "If and when there should be a token transferability it should be decided by the DAO itself, the token holder and delegates, and not by a small group of core contributors."

The spokesperson acknowledged that there had been an eagerness within sections of the community to make the Safe token transferable. "We're deeply committed to progressive decentralization, prioritizing secure infrastructure, fair governance frameworks, and transparent resource allocation," they added.

Safe listed on OKX

On Monday, cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced it would list SAFE for spot trading. SAFE deposits opened at 11:00 a.m. ET on April 22, with withdrawals starting at 6:00 a.m. ET on April 24. Following a company review, the exchange will list the SAFE/USDT trading pair. 

"Safe includes a full stack of account abstraction infrastructure and the industry-standard multi-sig wallet. The project is focused on making every Ethereum account, a smart account and enabling new use cases like AI, staking, gaming, SocialFi, DeFi and payments to flourish with gasless transactions, easy face-ID like logins, onramps, recovery and more," OKX wrote in a Monday post.

SafeDAO was previously known as Gnosis Safe, a custody solution offered by Gnosis DAO.