Things that I didn't understand during the deployment of the Gnosis Safe contracts on an EVM-based chain

I want to check my assumptions on things that I didn't fully understand during the deployment of the Gnosis Safe contracts on an EVM-based chain.

I would appreciate it if you could help me verify my assumptions about the deployment.

• Three steps below are needed to complete the Safe deployment.

  1. Make a request for a new deployment at https://github.com/safe-global/safe-singleton-factory.

  2. Deploy the Safe contracts on a custom network.

  3. Add the newly supported network to the safe-deployments repository located at https://github.com/safe-global/safe-deployments.

• The purpose of the first step is to employ a deterministic deployment proxy which allows the contracts' addresses to be predetermined.

• The second step requires having coins from the custom network, and this is the only purpose for adding the MNEMONIC to the .env file.

• Format of the MNEMONIC variable in the .env file is:

  MNEMONIC="antique assume recycle glance agent habit penalty forum behave danger crop weekend"
  

• The only purpose of including ETHERSCAN_API_KEY in .env is to update the Safe contracts code on the Etherscan.

Below is something that I cannot even begin to guess the purpose of:

• What is the purpose of the third step? Is the purpose of this to document the deployments of the custom networks?

You got it right. Adding your deployment to that repository will inform everyone that your chain has the Gnosis Safe singleton contract.

This repository is associated with an npm package, which the Gnosis Safe SDK depends on. This means that after adding your network, the SDK will be able to deploy and use contracts form your chain.