Secuwa

Secuwa is a self-custody personal finance platform built to bring mainstream users into on-chain savings and payments without the friction that has historically kept retail adoption low. The product eliminates seed phrases entirely, replacing them with passkey authentication backed by account abstraction smart contracts. Users sign in the same way they unlock their phone — through biometrics or a device PIN — while retaining full ownership of their funds on-chain.

The Problem Secuwa Is Solving

Traditional crypto wallets ask users to write down a twelve-to-twenty-four-word seed phrase, store it securely, and never lose it. For the population that Secuwa targets — retail users in regions like the United Kingdom and Nigeria with limited prior crypto experience — this requirement has been a hard barrier to adoption. At the same time, custodial solutions like centralized exchanges solve the UX problem by taking ownership of user funds, which reintroduces counterparty risk.

Secuwa sits between those two failure modes: full self-custody at the smart-contract layer, with a consumer-grade experience at the interface layer.

How It Works

Secuwa builds each user account as an account abstraction smart wallet deployed on EVM-compatible chains. Under the hood it relies on the Safe smart-contract infrastructure, an audited and battle-tested standard in the account abstraction space. Because the wallet is a smart contract rather than a raw private key, Secuwa can implement passkey modules that tie account authorization to the device credentials of each user — Apple iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager. There is no mnemonic to lose, and recovery flows through the same cloud-backup systems users already trust for their passwords.

Transaction execution uses gasless operations: the protocol bundles and sponsors gas costs for users, so first-time users can interact with DeFi protocols without needing to hold a native gas token first.

Savings and Yield

The core product function is structured stablecoin savings. Secuwa integrates with Aave, one of the most widely-used blue-chip lending protocols in DeFi, to generate yield on deposited stablecoins. Users can choose between flexible savings — accessible at any time — and fixed-term savings products that offer higher rates in exchange for a lock-up period.

The savings layer is denominated primarily in USDC, the Circle regulated stablecoin. Secuwa is a member of the Circle Alliance, and its integration extends to USYC (a tokenized yield-bearing instrument) and the Circle Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol for moving USDC across supported networks.

As of early 2025, Secuwa also began rolling out Spendable Savings, a feature that lets users make payments and transfers directly from their earning balance without first withdrawing to a standard wallet. This collapses the typical two-step workflow — earn yield, withdraw to spend — into a single unified balance.

Cross-Chain Architecture

Secuwa supports asset movement across Arbitrum, Base, and Polygon PoS. Cross-chain transactions route through Uniswap for token swaps and the Across Protocol intent bridge for fast cross-chain transfers. This gives users a single interface to move value between supported networks without managing bridging manually or understanding the underlying mechanics of each bridge.

The intent bridge model used by Across Protocol means that transfers settle quickly — typically in seconds — rather than waiting for canonical bridge finalization windows.

Fiat On and Off-Ramps

For users in supported regions, Secuwa provides IBAN-linked bank accounts that enable direct deposits and withdrawals in local currency. This fiat bridge is particularly relevant for its target markets in the UK and Nigeria, where access to dollar-denominated savings products through a domestic bank account is either expensive or unavailable through traditional finance.

The multi-currency wallet reduces foreign exchange fees when holding or transacting in multiple currencies, which is a meaningful utility for users in markets with volatile local currencies.

Investment Products

Beyond stablecoin savings, the Secuwa roadmap and Circle Alliance listing describe access to a broader investment layer: cryptocurrency holdings, exchange-traded funds, tokenized stocks, and other digital instruments. These features position the platform not just as a savings account but as a full retail investment interface — closer to a neobank than a simple crypto wallet.

Platform Availability

The application is available on Android, iOS, and web. It is marketed primarily to users in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with the United Kingdom and Nigeria listed as active country focuses. This geographic emphasis reflects the team thesis that users in those markets have the strongest unmet need for dollar-denominated, self-custody yield products.

Team and Funding

Secuwa was founded in August 2024. The team is led by a founder who goes by Afolabi and uses the handle Har4labiM on social media. The project received a grant through Questbook Arbitrum Season 2, which it completed with milestones including the initial app deployment, Aave integration across multiple networks, cross-chain transaction support, and early user testing. Secuwa is also an Alchemy infrastructure customer, using Alchemy gas sponsorship and bundler infrastructure to support its account abstraction transaction pipeline.

Security Posture

Secuwa security model rests primarily on the Safe smart-contract wallet standard, which has undergone multiple independent audits over its history as the most widely deployed multisig and smart account infrastructure in the EVM ecosystem. The passkey authentication layer adds a second dimension: because keys never leave the user device and are backed up through existing cloud infrastructure, phishing attacks targeting seed phrase exposure are structurally removed as an attack vector.

No independent audit of the Secuwa application layer has been publicly disclosed as of this writing. Users should account for this when evaluating the platform for large balances.

Network Positioning

Secuwa operates on EVM-compatible chains — Arbitrum, Base, and Polygon PoS — with Ethereum mainnet as an additional reference network. The platform architecture and integrations (Safe, Aave, Across, Uniswap) are natively EVM-based, and as of the most recent public disclosure, Secuwa has not announced integration with Solana or other non-EVM networks.

Its focus on account abstraction and passkey-based self-custody addresses a genuine usability gap in DeFi. As account abstraction infrastructure matures across the broader multi-chain ecosystem, expansion to additional networks remains a plausible longer-term direction for the platform.