If you want to learn about Squads, Squads Protocol and Squads Labs, but only have time to read one article - this is it, this is the article.

TL;DR

• Squads is a crypto company operations platform that simplifies management of developer and treasury assets for teams building on Solana and SVM. With Squads, teams can secure their treasuries, programs, validators, tokens in a multisig and jointly manage them. Think of it as a SaaS like product for teams building crypto companies, protocols and products on SVM.

• Squads is built on top of Squads Protocol - an open source, formally verified and immutable smart contract wallet infrastructure layer for Solana and SVM. Squads Protocol powers the multi-signature aspect of Squads allowing teams to manage various on-chain assets together in an intuitive, secure and decentralized way.

• Squads Labs is a company that is developing Squads Protocol and is currently building various commercial products on top of it, including Squads (squads.so) and Fuse (fuse.squads.so) as well as working on the next iteration of the protocol (v4).
  
  

Introduction

The process of developing a protocol or product in crypto has many unique aspects and challenges that do not exist in a traditional web2 environment. Unique challenges require unique solutions. With this in mind, we have built Squads to offer a user-friendly experience for crypto developers and operators when it comes to managing their core developer and treasury assets throughout the entire process of bringing their vision to life.

While every team’s journey is unique, most teams at some point raise VC funding or get a grant, deploy a program on chain, launch a token and start their own validator. Squads solves three core problems when it comes to managing these assets:

• user experience - we have transformed a lot of the experiences that previously required developers to interact with the CLI into well-designed user flows all contained within an intuitive interface;

• security - Squads is built on top of Squads Protocol which is a smart contract wallet infrastructure layer for Solana that allows to secure ownership of these assets with multi-signature logic, requiring multiple signatories to approve actions. That allows to decentralize control over these assets amongst the team and removes single points of failure;

• transparency - by requiring multisig approvals for management of these assets, parsing a lot of the relevant data in our interface and making it human readable, we provide teams with much greater transparency, allowing for the main stakeholders to have more visibility and a way to approve actions critical for the development of their project.
  
  

Protocol

Squads is built on top of Squads Protocol - a library of programs on Solana that together comprise the smart contract wallet layer for the ecosystem, allowing developers to leverage program level account abstraction and build a variety of products such as smart wallets and treasury management tools. Smart contract wallets is the most programmable, secure and transparent infrastructure layer for self-custody of crypto assets.

The most widely known example of a smart contract wallet is a multisig. They have been around since the early days of Bitcoin and are widely used for the purposes of self-custody of crypto assets across blockchains with Ethereum and Safe leading the charge in terms of adoption and awareness. A multisig is a non-custodial solution where control over assets is not exercised by a single private key, but rather by multiple private keys acting as owners of a smart contract where the assets reside. It can be thought of as a safe that requires multiple unique keys to open it and move the assets. That means that even if one of the keys is compromised - the assets are secure (no single point of failure).

Every Squad is a multisig at its core, which ensures that any transaction or action taken within Squads requires the approval of multiple members of the team. As a result, the risk of unauthorized or malicious activity is greatly reduced, as it becomes impossible for a single owner to access and manipulate funds or trigger harmful transactions to the protocol.

Squads Labs has been developing Squads Protocol since May 2021 and the current version (v3) has been finalized and made immutable in February 2023. Squads Labs is currently working on the next iteration of the protocol (v4) which will allow for greater programmability, permissioning and many other advanced features.

To ensure security and reliability of the protocol we made sure that it’s:

• Open source (https://github.com/Squads-Protocol/squads-mpl)

• Immutable (https://solana.fm/address/SMPLecH534NA9acpos4G6x7uf3LWbCAwZQE9e8ZekMu?cluster=mainnet-solanafmbeta)

• Formally verified (https://osec.io/blog/2023-01-26-formally-verifying-solana-programs)

• 3x times audited by Neodyme, OtterSec and Bramah Systems.

As of February 2022 close to USD 500 million in value has been secured by Squads Protocol.

Platform

At Squads we have identified that teams coming to build on Solana acquire two main types of on-chain assets throughout the lifetime of building out their projects: (1) treasury assets (VC funding, grants, revenue); and (2) developer assets (program, token, validator). Our product offering simplifies ownership and management of both as well providing a multi-signature functionality for securing them.

Treasury assets

When designing the treasury management aspect of Squads, we focused on fundamentals and figured out the main pain points teams run into when managing their treasury assets on-chain, which translated into a feature set allowing teams to:

• Secure their treasury (fungible tokens and NFTs) in a multisig

• Swap treasury assets (thanks to Jupiter Exchange)

• Stake SOL with any Solana validator or various liquid staking providers

• Track balance of their vault and view historical data

• Add contacts and easily send transactions to them

• Send crypto to multiple addresses in a single transactions

• Interact with various dapps in protocols in the Solana ecosystem to diversify their treasury.

Developer assets

Developer journey for teams building on Solana is full of surprises and chewing glass, so we wanted to make sure that when it comes to securing and managing core developer assets the experience is smooth and intuitive.

Program upgrades workflow and custody of the program upgrade authority are both burning questions for any team that ships to mainnet. He who controls the upgrade authority - controls the program, so the stakes are as high as they can be. With Squads, teams can transfer upgrade authority to a multisig, thus ensuring that control over the program does not reside with a single key. Once the authority is with a Squad, program upgrades happen via our user flow and require multisig approval before deployments allowing for greater security, transparency and decentralization.

Withdraw authority to a validator and token authority for your protocol token can be secured in a Squad and managed via user flows and dashboards we have built out for both.

Finally, the transaction builder allows to create custom transactions and populate them with arbitrary instructions providing an open design space for developers to craft custom workflows for interacting with their own or third party programs on Solana.

Squads is widely adopted by teams on Solana with treasury management, program management and transaction building being the most popular features to date. Our users include teams like Marginfi, Drift, Helius, Kamino, Clockwork, Pyth, Raydium, Jito and many others.

Labs

Squads Labs is a company that is the main contributor to Squads Protocol as well an entity delivering various product experiences on top of it. More information about the team can be found here.

Our partners and investors include Multicoin Capital, Jump Crypto, Collab + Currency, Delphi Digital, Reciprocal Ventures, Solana Ventures and others.

Get Started:

Squads platform: https://v3.squads.so/
Read the documentation: https://docs.squads.so/squads-v3-docs/
Review the code: https://github.com/Squads-Protocol/squads-mpl
Join the community: https://discord.com/invite/tYpY9UfRFx