In this episode of Stableminded, This Week in Fintech's stablecoin-focused series, Drew Rogers sits down with Clarisse Hagège and Christopher Grilhault des Fontaines, co-founders and co-CEOs of Dfns. This unique husband-and-wife team has built a security-focused wallet infrastructure company that powers many of the leading stablecoin payment platforms.

Dfns was founded in 2020 during the early days of COVID when Clarisse, a former banker, identified a critical gap in the market. While helping a company raise funds through an ICO in 2019, she discovered that institutional investors were interested in crypto, but existing wallet solutions weren't designed with the security standards that financial institutions required. Seeing the inevitable convergence of traditional finance and blockchain, she began building infrastructure that would enable applications to onboard to crypto securely and efficiently.

Christopher, an entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in consumer-facing applications, initially joined to help with operations but quickly became fully involved as a co-founder. The couple built the company while also starting a family - they now have two children alongside their "third child," Dfns.

At its core, Dfns focuses on securing digital assets through sophisticated key management services, with a particular emphasis on multi-party computation (MPC) technology. Unlike many wallet providers that prioritize frictionless user experience over security, Dfns believes that when it comes to valuable assets, users actually want and need appropriate security measures. Their approach has naturally led them to serve financial institutions and enterprises that handle significant digital assets.

Clarisse and Christopher highlight how Dfns has evolved from purely key management to a comprehensive wallet infrastructure that includes transaction building, blockchain indexing, and transaction lifecycle management across multiple chains through a unified API. This enables their clients - including many of the stablecoin payment companies featured throughout this podcast series - to focus on their core business rather than implementing complex security infrastructure.

As the stable coin ecosystem has grown dramatically over the past year, Dfns has seen corresponding growth. The company is positioned to benefit from the continuing maturation of the space, particularly as regulatory frameworks become clearer globally.

Thank you to Dfns for sponsoring this season of Stableminded.

Watch the full episodes below!