Squads

Squads is the dominant multisig and smart account platform on Solana, providing the security infrastructure that teams, treasuries, and protocols depend on to manage assets without single points of failure. Founded in May 2021 and born out of a Solana Season Hackathon project, Squads has evolved from a governance application into a comprehensive business operations layer, today securing more than $15 billion in assets across more than 450 teams.

What Squads Does

At its core, Squads is a non-custodial platform where multiple private keys must jointly authorize a transaction. Rather than relying on a single wallet or a centralized custodian, teams create a multisig — a shared smart account — that enforces collective approval before any funds move or any program is modified. The rules governing that account, including how many members must sign, which roles can propose or execute transactions, and what spending limits apply, are enforced entirely by Squads Protocol and Solana's validator network, not by a corporate intermediary.

This architecture addresses one of the most persistent risks in crypto: the single-key failure. Whether through human error, hardware loss, or targeted attack, a single compromised key can drain a treasury or brick a deployed program. Squads removes that risk by distributing authority across multiple signers while providing an approachable interface that eliminates the need for command-line tooling.

The Protocol Stack

Squads Labs has shipped four major protocol versions. The current flagship is Squads v4, which introduced significant capability expansions over v3: time locks on transactions, sub-accounts for departmental fund segregation, granular roles (Proposer, Voter, Executor), spending limits that authorize specific members to transact within preset bounds without requiring full multisig consensus, support for address lookup tables, and a fee relayer that allows the multisig itself to pay network fees on behalf of its members — eliminating the friction of requiring every signer to hold SOL.

Squads v3 was made immutable in February 2023 after six months of operation, locking the protocol code permanently on-chain. The v4 program went further on the security front: it completed audits by OtterSec, Neodyme, and Trail of Bits, and crucially became the first formally verified smart contract program on Solana when Certora completed a formal verification report in late 2023. Certora conducted additional verification work in December 2024 and January 2025, using the Certora Prover to mathematically rule out entire classes of contract bugs. All protocol code is open-source on GitHub under Squads-Protocol.

Use Cases

Squads serves four overlapping user categories.

Treasury teams use Squads to hold and distribute protocol funds. DAOs, venture funds, and project treasuries manage tokens, NFTs, staking positions, and on-chain swaps through a shared multisig that requires agreement before any transaction executes. Integration with Jupiter provides access to spot swaps and limit orders directly within the interface.

Developer teams use Squads to protect upgrade authorities for deployed Solana programs. When a smart contract's upgrade key is held by a multisig, no single engineer can push a code change or disable a protocol — all modifications require team consensus and appear transparently in the approval log. The same pattern applies to token authorities: minting, burning, and metadata changes all pass through the multisig.

Validator operators use Squads to secure withdraw keys and manage commission rates, protecting staking rewards from unauthorized access.

Enterprise and fintech builders use Squads Grid, the protocol's developer API, to embed accounts, payments, card issuance, and yield into their own products. Grid was built on the same smart account primitives as the Squads multisig and extends them into stablecoin-native financial infrastructure.

Product Suite Expansion

Starting in 2024, Squads Labs broadened its product line beyond multisig. Altitude is a business banking interface built on Squads smart accounts, allowing teams to hold stablecoins including USDC and EURC, earn yield, pay bills, send wires and ACH transfers, and receive payments — all without leaving the onchain environment. Altitude launched with a strategic investment from Haun Ventures and added integrations with Coinbase for USDC and with Privy for gasless transactions powered by the Grid API. Fuse is the consumer-facing equivalent: a personal finance application supporting stablecoins and tokenized assets.

Smart Transactions, launched in 2025, added programmable execution logic as an autonomous finance primitive — enabling transaction flows that trigger on conditions rather than requiring manual approval every time.

Ecosystem Footprint

The depth of Squads adoption reflects its position as foundational infrastructure. Pyth Network, Jito, Helium, Drift, Helius, Raydium, and Marginfi are among the major Solana protocols that rely on Squads to secure program upgrades and treasury assets. The breadth of this user base across DeFi, infrastructure, oracle networks, and liquid staking means that Squads sits in the trust path for a large share of value flowing through the Solana ecosystem.

SquadsX, a browser extension wallet, allows multisig members to connect any Squads account to Solana applications directly, enabling yield farming, borrowing, and other interactions while maintaining multisig-level approval controls rather than falling back to a solo key.

Business Model

Core multisig functionality is available at no cost. Squads Pro, priced at $399 per month per Squad, unlocks advanced features including spending limits, roles and permissions, sub-accounts, and the fee relayer. The Grid API targets enterprise and developer customers building stablecoin payment infrastructure, and Squads Labs has launched a $100,000 founder grant program to accelerate Grid ecosystem adoption.

Why It Matters

Multisig is not a niche product on Solana — it is increasingly the default security posture for any team managing meaningful on-chain assets. The alternative, a single EOA-style key, concentrates risk in a way that most professional teams can no longer justify. Squads has made multisig accessible by hiding its operational complexity behind an interface that works without deep technical expertise, while simultaneously deepening the protocol's capabilities for sophisticated users through roles, spending limits, and formal verification. The result is a platform that scales from a two-person startup protecting a seed grant to a mature protocol managing hundreds of millions in treasury assets.