Squads

Squads is the main multisig wallet on Solana. A multisig is a shared account that needs several people to approve a payment before it goes through. That way, one lost or stolen key can't drain it. DAOs, funds and protocol teams use Squads to hold their money. They also use it to control who can upgrade their programs or mint their tokens. The Squads Multisig page says more than 450 teams use it, as of November 2026. The company behind it, Squads Labs, also makes Altitude, a business account for stablecoins. Squads has no token.

How a Squads multisig works on Solana

A Squads multisig is an on-chain account, called a Squad. It has a list of members and a threshold: the number of them who must approve, such as two out of three. The Squad's money sits in a vault that only the Squads program can move. One member proposes a payment and the others vote. Once enough say yes, it can be sent. Until then, nothing moves.

The rules are enforced by the Squads Protocol program on Solana, whose code is public on GitHub. The Squads app is only a front end that builds these proposals and asks members to sign them.

Say one founder's laptop is hacked. The attacker can sign with that key, but the other members still have to agree before a single token leaves the vault. The same model works for a program's upgrade authority: hand it to a Squad, and shipping new code to mainnet needs the same quorum as moving money.

Squads v4 features: time locks, spending limits and permissions

Squads Protocol v4 added controls that a plain multisig lacks. The v4 repository lists time locks, spending limits, roles and sub-accounts. A time lock makes you wait between approval and payout. A spending limit lets named members move a set amount without a full vote. Roles split who can propose, who can vote and who can send.

Each control fixes a real problem with team wallets:

• Time locks of an hour, a day, a week or a custom length hold every approved transaction for that long. Members get a window to spot a bad one before it runs.
• Spending limits cover one token each, reset each period, and can be tied to the addresses you list. Payroll can run without five people signing every week.
• Permissions make a member a Proposer, Voter or Executor. A bot can propose payments it can never approve. Squads' docs say permissions need a paid plan.
• Sub-accounts give each department or fund its own vault under one Squad.

The app also handles program upgrades, token mint authority and validator withdraw keys, and swaps through Jupiter JUP$0.261+4.6% from inside the vault.

Squads multisig price: plans and network fees

A basic Squad is free apart from a small one-time fee to set it up. The paid Pro plan costs $49 a month and adds team roles, payments, sub-accounts and the SquadsX extension. Large firms can ask for a custom Enterprise plan.

The Squads Multisig page put the deployment fee at 0.05 SOL in November 2026. The docs pricing page still said 0.1 SOL.

Pro is billed from your own vault. Squads sets up a monthly USDC spending limit that pays the bill. If the balance runs short, you get a week to top up before Pro features switch off.

Each transaction also costs more in network fees than a normal wallet transfer. The costs page puts a token withdrawal at about 0.005 SOL, because each proposal has to store its votes on-chain. Part of that is rent, a refundable deposit you can claw back with the app's rent reclaim feature. Solana is cutting its rent rate in steps, so the real cost may now be lower. Squads says it charges no fee on transactions other than limit orders, at 0.25%.

How to create a multisig wallet on Solana with Squads

Setting up a Squad takes five steps: connect a wallet to the Squads app, name the Squad, add each member's wallet address, choose the threshold, then fund the vault address. You need a Solana wallet for each signer and a little SOL for the deployment fee and rent.

The threshold is the choice that matters most. Two out of three lets you lose one key and still reach your funds. Three out of five suits a larger team. Avoid a low threshold across many signers: the Drift exploit hit a Squad that needed only two of five.

For personal custody, co-founder Stepan Simkin suggested in October 2026 a two-of-three Squad using hardware wallets from different makers. Then a flaw or supply-chain attack at one vendor can't reach the funds. For teams he listed dedicated signing devices, a spread of signers, a second front end to check transactions against, and alerts on the account.

SquadsX browser extension: use DeFi apps from a multisig

SquadsX is a browser extension that lets your Squad connect to Solana apps the way a normal wallet would. You can lend, borrow or stake from the vault, and every transaction still goes to the Squad for approval. It comes with the paid plans.

Without SquadsX, a team that wanted to use a DeFi app would usually move funds to one member's hot wallet first, which undoes the point of a multisig. With it, the app sees the vault as the wallet, and the signing request turns into a Squads proposal.

Squads' SquadsX docs still call it beta and warn that bugs or compatibility issues may occur. Expect some apps not to work with it.

Altitude, Grid and Fuse: Squads' stablecoin products

Squads Labs makes three money apps on top of the multisig. They all hold dollars as stablecoins, which are tokens pegged to a currency. Altitude is a business account for saving, spending and paying in dollars and euros. Grid is a toolkit for developers who want to add stablecoin accounts, payments and cards to their own apps. Fuse is a personal finance app.

Altitude's site says firms in more than 200 countries can open dollar and euro accounts. They don't need a US company to do it. Altitude also offers cards, bill pay, invoices, and links to QuickBooks and Xero. You can pay out by bank transfer in many regions, such as ACH in the US and SEPA in Europe, or in stablecoins.

Your balance sits in USDC and EURC in an account your business controls. Bank services come from licensed partners such as Bridge and Circle. Altitude's site warns that stablecoin balances are not FDIC-insured deposits.

Altitude adds features often. It bought the invoicing app Acctual on 15 September 2026. On 14 October 2026 it launched a read-only link for AI agents, so an agent can read your account but can't move money. Altitude also showed QR-code invoice payments that settle in USDC on Solana, which we covered in X9.150 QR code payments.

Grid creates non-custodial accounts for each of a developer's users, so an app can offer dollar balances without holding customer funds itself.

Who should use a Solana multisig like Squads

Squads is built for teams that hold real value or control a program on Solana: DAOs, protocol teams, funds, validator operators and companies with a crypto treasury. If two or more people should sign off before money or code moves, Squads is the standard choice on Solana. The catch is speed. Every action waits on other people to approve it.

Some fits are clear:

• A protocol team should hold its upgrade authority and mint authority in a Squad with a time lock, so a single key can't push malicious code.
• A validator operator can keep the withdraw authority in a Squad and leave the hot vote key on the server.
• A DAO paying contributors can use spending limits so payroll doesn't need a full vote every cycle.
• An individual with a large balance can run a 2-of-3 across hardware wallets.

Squads is a poor fit if you trade often, sign alone, or hold little. The deployment fee, higher network fees and approval delay all cost more than they protect on a small balance. Companies that mainly want a dollar account with cards and bill pay should look at Altitude rather than the raw multisig.

Is Squads safe? Audits, formal verification and the Drift exploit

Four firms have audited the Squads v4 program. Certora also checked key rules with formal verification. Squads says no one can change the code: its security page says v4 has been locked since November 2024, "unalterable by Squads Labs or any third party". The biggest loss tied to Squads, at Drift, came from a weak setup and tricked signers. It did not come from a bug in the program.

All the audits below cover the v4 on-chain program, per Squads' audit list. None of them covers the Squads app, SquadsX, Altitude or Grid. Formal verification means using maths to prove that the code always keeps certain rules, such as never letting the threshold rise above the number of members.

The older v3 program, locked since February 2023, was the test case for OtterSec's Solana formal verification tool.

A bug bounty pays up to $300,000 for a proven way to steal funds from either program. We took the "locked" claim from Squads' docs and did not check the upgrade authority on-chain ourselves.

Squads is non-custodial. Squads Labs never holds your keys, so the safety of a Squad depends on how you set it up and who signs. That is where the losses happened.

On 1 April 2026, attackers took about $280 million from Drift Protocol DRIFT$0.013-0.1%, The Block reported. According to QuillAudits' analysis, Drift's security council used a Squads multisig that needed only two of five signers.

It had no time lock. The attackers tricked at least two signers into signing transactions days early. They used durable nonces, a Solana feature that keeps a signed transaction valid with no expiry. Then they gave themselves admin control.

QuillAudits found no flaw in the Squads v4 code. Its verdict was that "no code was broken, governance was". With no time lock, the attacker's transactions ran the moment they had enough votes.

The front end is the other weak point. After the Bybit hack in February 2025 was traced to malicious code from Safe{Wallet}'s infrastructure, Squads began a review of its own infrastructure. In April 2026 it released, with the security firm STRIDE, three open-source tools for checking proposals outside the main app. They are multisig-cli, multisig-verifier and multisig-monitor. The Squads Backup Kit adds a minimal interface, a CLI and the v4 SDK, so you can still reach your funds if app.squads.so goes down.

Other limits are smaller. SquadsX is still beta. A Squads builder has tested post-quantum signing on mainnet, but it has no release date. In his 30 October 2026 custody post, Simkin wrote that Squads was not hit by the Binance incident and that all its systems were running.

Squads vs Realms, Snowflake and other Solana multisig wallets

For a team multisig on Solana, Squads is the usual pick. Crypto.news calls it "the de facto standard for multisig on the network", and its v4 program lists seven audit reports from four firms. Other tools suit narrower needs. Realms fits token-holder voting. Multi-chain tools such as TotalSig suit teams spread across many networks, and Safe suits teams that live on Ethereum.

Realms is Solana's governance tool for DAOs where token holders vote on proposals. A Squad is a small group of named signers. Many DAOs use both: Realms decides, and a Squad carries out the decision.

Snowflake is an older Solana multisig with payroll, vesting and a Safe-style app store. Its website still carries a 2022 copyright, so check that it is maintained before you trust it with funds. TotalSig is a multi-chain multisig and MPC wallet that supports Solana as one of several networks. Safe fills the same role on Ethereum.

Many Solana teams also build on Squads. Sanctum CLOUD$0.044+0.6%'s App 2.0 protects user funds with Squads Multisig. Blockworks named Helium, Kamino, Pyth, Helius, Drift, Jupiter and Ellipsis among Squads users in 2025.

Squads Labs founders, funding and history

Squads Labs goes back to a 2021 Solana hackathon. Co-founder and CEO Stepan Simkin later wrote on X that the team "didn't win anything" there.

In that September 2026 post, Simkin said the protocol now handles more than $20 billion a year in stablecoin transfers. We covered that milestone at the time.

Solana Ventures led an $18 million round in April 2026, crypto.news reported. Coinbase Ventures and Haun Ventures took part, and the money went to growing Altitude.

Crypto.news put the total raised at about $43 million. Squads and Coinbase had teamed up in August 2025 to make USDC the main stablecoin in all Squads apps.

The multisig has gone through several versions, and the fourth is the current one. Its site calls Squads Labs "a financial technology company, not a bank or a digital asset custodian."