NewTech Friday: Dfns – building essential infrastructure for crypto

Clarisse Hagège, CEO of Dfns, sat down with Efma’s Boris Plantier to discuss how her company is solving crucial cryptocurrency problems. 

I discovered the problem of private keys during the summer of 2019, during a sponsorship program with Crédit Agricole. I was given the mission to lead the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) of IOV, a blockchain startup incubated at Le Village. As I was selling their tokens to investors, I had to tell them that if they lost their private key, they would lose their entire investment. 
 
Due to the nature of blockchain technology, a private key is needed to access a wallet and losing it means losing all of your money. This seemed absurd given that blockchain was promising to revolutionize finance by increasing its level of speed, transparency, and freedom. Coming from the banking industry, which at the time was concerned about the rise of neobanks like Revolut offering customers a new experience without paperwork or unfair and non-transparent fees, I was convinced that crypto would have to solve this security issue before proclaiming itself the future of finance. 
 
Pursuing my investigation into crypto custody and the technologies utilized, I met ZenGo's founder at the Berlin Blockchain Week who mentioned MPC and TSS. Amazed to discover the cryptographic properties of these protocols, I wrote and published an article on Medium proposing a new way to store digital assets with MPC-TSS. To my surprise, insurance giant AXA invited me to pitch my idea the following week and loved it. I resigned from Crédit Agricole the day after and went on to create Dfns.

Dfns is a safe, cloud-native developer tool that gives banks, investors, and companies the freedom to enter crypto markets on a battle-designed security infrastructure. Custody of digital assets requires maximal security—don't DIY. Financial institutions of all sizes—from crypto startups to Tier 1 banks—use our fully-managed custody platform to scale and gain exposure to crypto without ever compromising the safety of their day-to-day operations. By way of deep, trendsetting cryptography, we have successfully managed to create a keyless wallet generator allowing our clients to trade, transfer, and store crypto without having to worry a single second. 
 
Dfns is powered by a decentralized custody network designed to break up the inner complications of blockchains and reinstate frictionless business environments. We make sure that digital assets are safe-kept with respect to the most law-abiding market procedures. You can smoothly deploy on-premise your own crypto custody infrastructure in no time, and capitalize on streamlined feature delivery and advanced security updates. Dfns saves you and your team from spending precious time on labor-intensive tasks and ensures that the middle and back office experience stays the same as always. We are building the legos for crypto banking, brick by brick.

We just finished a 3-month long acceleration program with Techstars Future of Finance in collaboration with ABN AMRO and are now targeting a €6M seed round for this summer to accelerate our go-to-market and scale our team. In parallel, we launched our beta and lined up more than 30 companies to try it out. Starting July, our goal will be to (1) develop multi-tenancy infrastructure, (2) multiply blockchain and coin integrations, and (3) diversify the granular business rules our API can support. 
 
From a longer-term perspective, we are currently studying the idea of decentralizing our product even further and becoming a DAO. We need to complete our analysis of the security challenges and the product implications of such a change, as novelty doesn't always come with safety, but we are convinced that DeFi is the future of finance.