# Staying safe COLLAB has no accounts to hack and no admin who can move a DAO's assets, but you can still lose funds: to a copycat DAO or token, to a fake site, to a transaction you did not read, or to a bug in an alpha. This page is for everyone who uses a COLLAB site. It lists the habits that prevent most losses and what to do when something looks wrong. What the contracts themselves guarantee is in [Security at a glance](security-overview.md). ## Copycat DAOs A DAO's name is not unique, and its logo is public bytes anyone can copy. **The web address is the identity**: every DAO has a permanent, unique web address, `/dao/`, chosen at creation, and a treasury address that never changes. - Anyone can create a DAO with any free web address and any name and logo, including one that imitates another group. Web addresses use lowercase letters, digits and hyphens only, but look-alikes remain, such as `l` and `1`, `0` and `o`, or `rn` and `m`. A web address or a name says nothing about who runs a DAO. - When a DAO's name matches another's, look-alike letters from other alphabets included, every page of the DAO says **Another DAO has this name**, with its own address and links to the others, and cards and directory rows show **Name shared** next to the web address. See [Another DAO has this name](dao-identity.md#another-dao-has-this-name). - Wherever a DAO vouches for something, such as the issuer of a token, it appears with its web address in full. - Bookmark the DAOs you use, and check the web address and the treasury address against what the group itself publishes before you fund, join or trade. A site's operator can hide squatted or spam DAOs from that site's listings. That changes nothing on chain and nothing on other copies of the site: hidden pages stay reachable by their address, with a notice. ## Unverified tokens Anyone can create a token with any name or symbol, and any DAO can launch one. DeSciFi says plainly how far a site vouches for each token: only tokens the site's operator verified, or launched by a DAO the operator features, count as verified, together with L1 and wL1. Everything else carries "… is not verified by this site." with its full contract address. A token that came from a link you opened also needs one explicit check of its address before the page lets you approve or trade it. See [Verification](swap.md#verification) and [The link check](swap.md#the-link-check). - Compare a token's contract address with one the project publishes, not with its name or symbol. - Anyone can create a member airdrop for a DAO's members, also with a token that imitates a real one. The Treasury section lists those apart as "Not created by this DAO". Check such a token's address before you claim it, and never approve or trade it on a site you do not know. - Prefer exact approvals to unlimited ones. COLLAB approves the exact amount unless you switch on an unlimited approval, and warns when you do. ## Phishing - **Use the site's real address.** COLLAB's own site for GenesisL1 is `https://collab.genesisl1.com`; `dao.genesisl1.com`, `collab.descifi.org` and `dao.descifi.org` redirect to it. Check the address bar, especially when you arrive from a search result, an advertisement or a message. - **Copies are legitimate, and so are fakes.** Anyone may run a copy of COLLAB, and every copy reads the same chain, so a DAO is the same DAO everywhere. But a fake site can serve altered code that asks your wallet to sign something else. Your wallet shows what you actually sign: read it. To be sure of the code, host the release yourself or compare the files you are served with the release's `SHA256SUMS`. - **COLLAB never asks for your seed phrase or your wallet's private key.** Every transaction and signature goes through your wallet. The only private key a COLLAB page shows you or asks you for is an API key for running a paid GL1F model, which your browser can generate for that purpose or which you paste to sign one request; see [Models with GL1F](models.md#running-a-model). Never paste a wallet key there, or anywhere else. - **Your encryption key comes from a signature.** For sealed data, your wallet signs one message, and the signature becomes your encryption key. The message names your account, the chain and the keyring but not the site, so it is the same on every copy of COLLAB on this deployment, and anyone who can make your wallet sign it gets your key: sign it only on a COLLAB site you trust. See [Your encryption key](sealed-data.md#your-encryption-key). - **Treat requests for keys as attacks.** A message asking for your seed phrase, your private key, a look at your screen or a "verification" transaction is an attack, whoever it seems to come from. ## Wallet hygiene - Use a separate account for DAO work and trading, and keep only what you need in it. Keep larger holdings in a wallet you do not connect to websites. - Your wallet must be on GenesisL1, chain 29; the site asks it to switch when it is not, and every transaction carries the chain ID. - Keep some L1 for network fees. A failed transaction still costs at least half its gas limit on GenesisL1; see [Costs and gas](costs.md#a-failed-transaction-still-pays). - Review the approvals your account has given and set the ones you no longer need back to zero. - Use an RPC endpoint you trust, or your own node; see [RPC endpoints](wallet.md#rpc-endpoints). An endpoint could show false data, but it cannot sign for you, and COLLAB checks the addresses that matter through your wallet's own network before it sends anything to a DAO. ## Check what you sign - **Proposals.** Before you vote, read the proposal's review: every action described in plain language beside the raw call, checked against the hash the governor stored, with every recipient and every rule listed and unlisted integrations flagged. Run the simulation on the proposal's page. A Raw transaction or a DAO signature can do anything a passed critical vote can. See [The review panel](proposals.md#the-review-panel). - **Transactions.** COLLAB simulates each transaction before your wallet opens and shows why it would fail. Before a transaction goes to a DAO's contracts or pays its treasury, it reads the DAO's addresses again through your wallet's network and sends nothing if they differ from what the page shows. - **Fees.** Large transactions show their fee, and what a failure would cost, before you sign. - **Signatures.** A DAO signature approves a hash as if the DAO had signed the message behind it; a permit hidden in typed data can let a spender move the DAO's tokens. Read what the hash commits to. - **Irreversible steps.** Giving up a token's capabilities or ownership, locking liquidity forever, deleting a model, revealing or declassifying sealed data, and opening a model's licence cannot be undone. The composer warns about each, and asks you to confirm the token, lock and deletion steps before it builds them; take those warnings seriously. ## Small amounts in the alpha COLLAB 2.2 is an alpha. Its contracts, server kit and website had AI-assisted reviews, done apart from the implementation work, and there has been no external audit. By default every page says so in the strip at its top: "Alpha: COLLAB runs on GenesisL1 mainnet and has had no external audit. Use small amounts." (A site's operator can reword or hide the strip; the release stays an alpha either way.) - Keep in a DAO, a pool or a lock only what you can afford to lose. - Start with short periods and conservative governance settings, and treat the first DAOs as a public test. - Governance is powerful by design: a proposal that passes the critical rules can move the whole treasury, and the timelock is warning time, not a veto. Choose quorum, thresholds and timelocks that fit how much your members trust each other. The full list is in [Known limitations](limits.md). ## Reporting problems - **Security issues.** Report them privately, through a GitHub security advisory on the COLLAB repository or to the maintainers of GenesisL1 directly, before disclosing them publicly. Include a proof of concept if you can. See [Security](SECURITY.md#reporting-a-vulnerability). - **Questions and other reports** are welcome on [GitHub](https://github.com/GenesisL1). - **A site's content**, such as which DAOs it features or hides and which tokens it verifies, is up to its operator; contact the operator of that site. Nobody can reverse a transaction on GenesisL1, and COLLAB's contracts have no admin who could. A DAO can only act by its own votes. ## Related - [Security at a glance](security-overview.md) - [Known limitations](limits.md) - [Swap on DeSciFi](swap.md) - [Name, web address, logo and description](dao-identity.md) - [Wallets, networks and settings](wallet.md) - [Costs and gas](costs.md)