#26 – Clarisse Hagège: The Future of Wallet Security & MPC Infrastructure
Episode description
In this episode of the Applied Blockchain Podcast, Adi Ben-Ari speaks with Clarisse Hagège, CEO & Co-founder of Dfns, board member of the MPC Alliance, and one of Europe’s leading voices in digital asset security, about the future of wallet infrastructure and why the next decade of blockchain will be defined by secure, programmable digital custody.
With a background spanning Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Crédit Agricole CIB, and three advanced degrees in economics and finance, Clarisse combines deep institutional experience with a builder’s mindset. Today she leads Dfns, a cybersecurity company pioneering next-generation wallet infrastructure powered by MPC and API-based key management.
Together, Adi and Clarisse explore, but not limited to:
- Why wallet infrastructure is becoming the critical layer for Web3 adoption
- The shift from private keys to MPC, distributed signing, and hardware-free security
- How custody and authentication are converging into programmable, automated architectures
- Why enterprises are demanding bank-grade security for digital assets
Resources Mentioned
- Dfns: Next-gen wallet infrastructure
- MPC Alliance: Global standards for multiparty computation
- Research and discussions on wallet security, MPC vs HSMs, and institutional digital asset architecture
Transcript
Narrator (Intro):
You’re listening to the Applied Blockchain Podcast, hosted by Adi Ben-Ari, Founder and CEO of Applied Blockchain. Join him as he sits down with global experts to uncover how blockchain is driving real-world impact. Today’s guest is Clarisse Hagège, CEO and Founder of Dfns, the crypto wallet infrastructure firm now collaborating with IBM on the new enterprise-grade platform, IBM Digital Asset Haven.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Hi Clarisse, welcome to the Applied Blockchain Podcast.
Clarisse Hagège:
Thank you very much for having me.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Right, Clarisse — for our listeners, could you give us a bit of an introduction? Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into this crazy world.
Clarisse Hagège:
Sure, of course. I come from a finance background. I spent about ten years in banking, and during that time I began learning about blockchain technology while working on efficiency improvements for trade finance. I was structuring products in export and trade finance, and we were looking at the inefficiencies around sending LOCs from one place to another. We looked at blockchain technology and thought there was potential to make the process more efficient.
That was 2013. At the time, there was a big divide between crypto and the underlying tech. That’s when I started getting interested in the technology and following everything that was happening in the space.
Then in 2015, a friend came to me with an idea that I still think is very interesting — and the timing today would be perfect, though we were ten years early. The idea was to create a food coin, essentially a remittance application for food payments between the US and Mexico, leveraging stablecoins.
Adi Ben-Ari:
For food?
Clarisse Hagège:
Yes — food coin. The problem he identified was that remittance money wasn’t always used for its intended purpose. It was sometimes used for gambling or other types of purchases. The idea was to enable remittance funds to be spent only on food. I thought it was a great idea, but at the time, in 2015–16, smart contracts were barely emerging. It was very hard to build anything. After about a year and a half of trying, we put the idea aside. I never quit my job for it. But that was the moment I became completely convinced that the entire finance industry would run on-chain. It was not a matter of if, but when.
Long story short, in 2019 I decided to resign and launch Dfns, because I felt the infrastructure needed to build applications simply wasn’t in place. Custody technology at the time was not fit for enabling players to build. It was mostly dashboard-first solutions designed for the buy-side market interested in crypto trading.
Adi Ben-Ari:
So, Clarisse, before we move on to what you did next, on the trade finance side, I’m curious. We actually have some parallels in our story, because I was also at a bank and got dragged into some trade finance use cases. And I know there were some quite high-profile projects around 2017–18, maybe earlier, and most of those didn’t survive. What’s your view on that?
Clarisse Hagège:
It’s still my realisation that in trade finance we saw startups building platforms to optimise processes. They launched using blockchain technology, only to realise they themselves were acting as the third-party trust provider.
So blockchain ended up adding complexity to the overall workflow because banks weren’t equipped to handle it. Some of the players I’m thinking of launched widely adopted platforms that massively improved the trade finance process — but they all dropped the blockchain component.
I think it’s a really interesting subject because, in my opinion, there are several use cases like that where you run into the classic chicken-and-egg issue. If the infrastructure isn’t in place, then you might have a better solution using blockchain, but it becomes impossible to adopt for players who don’t have the infrastructure or knowledge to manage the technology.
So yes — I still think blockchain could be a major improvement for trade finance, but those platforms quickly created a strong network effect. That makes switching to blockchain much harder, especially because they remain the trust provider. Until they mess up, I don’t think anyone will want to reinvest heavily in adopting new technology in this space.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Do you think the type of blockchain technology they used — most of the ones I know were private blockchains rather than public — was a factor?
Clarisse Hagège:
At the time, I don’t think it was a factor. And you’re right: one of the players I’m thinking about was using R3. They were all on private blockchains because banks couldn’t realistically adopt any other kind of technology back then.
It’s a good question. I think at the time it was more of an infrastructure issue. People in innovation teams within banks were very scarce, trying to push one subject, and trade finance divisions were not really under the spotlight for this type of exercise. So I think it was more an issue of infrastructure and readiness.
You do see initiatives now — I think Citi has done something quite large at scale within their bank, leveraging blockchain. Still a private blockchain, but for their trade finance capabilities, and it has improved their internal process. I do believe we’ll see new solutions — especially as we move into a world where transactions can settle on stablecoins. If the settlement is on-chain, then there will be even more incentive to ensure the documentation is also on-chain and follows the same route.
So I think blockchain will come back into trade finance eventually, but at the time, the issue was less private versus public and more about understanding and having the infrastructure available to manage such technology.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Okay, interesting. My thought on this is that with the private blockchain model, every party in the trade finance lifecycle has to host a node if they want to keep commercial privacy.
Clarisse Hagège:
Yeah.
Adi Ben-Ari::
So part of the infrastructure challenge you’re talking about is really that every party has to host part of the solution.
Clarisse Hagège:
Yeah.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Whereas now there are alternatives — you can have solutions where you don’t give a central party full control, so you’re not creating a new intermediary, and at the same time you’re not forcing every player in the chain to host nodes and infrastructure.
Clarisse Hagège:
What you’re saying is that the barrier to entry was quite high there.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Correct. It’s not the only problem, but I think it was one of the points of friction that slowed these things down.
Clarisse Hagège:
Yeah.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Okay. So then it’s still quite a big jump from that world to custody.
Clarisse Hagège:
To custody, yeah.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Because—
Clarisse Hagège:
Yes. I think I skipped a bit of the story, but the big realisation was that during the summer of 2019, I helped a startup that was incubated by the bank I was working for. I helped them raise a private ICO, and what was interesting to me was seeing whether institutional investors were ready to buy.
And to my surprise, at the time they were actually quite interested — but once again, the infrastructure was terrifying to them.
They were like, “Okay, so either I need to pay 70 basis points over whatever I’m going to buy of these tokens and onboard with a custodian that I don’t know, that isn’t even based in my jurisdiction… or the alternative is to enable my traders to have nano ledgers in their pockets and have them pretty much leave with our funds.”
So I think, in order to make those sales successful, I really dived into: Okay, what was the state of custody tech?
And as I told you, because I was very convinced that for cash management, cross-border payments, tokenisation — on the debt capital markets, equity capital markets, securitisation — blockchain could be transformative…
We actually see very interesting large-scale initiatives today in Brazil on securitisation for auto loans and consumer loans, which, once again, is another place in banks that is highly inefficient in terms of operations.
I really thought blockchain was a painkiller. I see it as a super-powered database — an extremely powerful database that enables the finance industry to be more efficient and to achieve huge gains in capital efficiency as well.
So because I was convinced that every single division within a bank will run on-chain — whether private or public, that’s another matter — but the technology itself was too important and too useful not to be adopted…
What was interesting to me was that I didn’t find any solution that was easy enough for those players to integrate and build on top of a wallet infrastructure.
In my opinion, the big build-versus-buy issue comes in here. If you want the technology to be adopted, you cannot reinvent the wheel every time you’re starting a new application. You need to leverage technologies that are out of the box and that enable you to save time.
And so this is how I resigned — to build Dfns — which is very much an API-first solution that can be implemented—
Adi Ben-Ari:
Just out of curiosity, did you join forces with that other startup? Or did you end up doing your own thing?
Clarisse Hagège: (00:09:43):
Which one?
Adi Ben-Ari:
The one that was incubated.
Clarisse Hagège:
No, no. I didn’t join forces. We had talked about it, but no.
What was interesting to me was really the custody piece. They were solving another issue — which is also close to custody — the blockchain name service.
They were addressing the public key issue, which, to this day, I think is going to become an area that receives more attention in the coming years.
Up until now, we’ve had IBANs, we’ve had addresses that aren’t readable. And also, if you want privacy, I’m not going to put my name on my public key. So there were a lot of conflicting issues around blockchain name service.
I do believe that there will be a convergence between KYB and blockchain name service, and that more and more wallet providers and infrastructure providers will want to create new solutions around BNS in the coming years.
I still think it’s an interesting topic, but at the time — in 2019 — I don’t know that it was such a big problem.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Okay, that’s interesting as well, because if you associate addresses with KYB, there’s still a privacy angle there, isn’t there?
Clarisse Hagège:
Right, yeah — you can still be anonymous. I think another thing is that as a wallet provider, we forge a private key and we also forge a public key. You can enable the system to provide some provenance in terms of how it was generated, what technology was used, and so on.
So for KYT and transaction monitoring, it also enables more readability on that data. I think these are very interesting subjects. I would love to spend more time on them.
But yes, I believe we will be investing quite a bit in the next few years on that topic.
Adi Ben-Ari:
So Clarisse, you made this huge jump — leaving a big organisation and going with this crazy idea. What did that look like in practice?
Clarisse Hagège:
If you want to get into the details — it really did seem like a crazy idea at the time. So first, when I decided to launch Dfns, to me it felt like a safe bet in the sense that it was an emerging technology that I was convinced would form the future.
It was a very clear subject to understand, and the custody piece is kind of like picking the shovel, right? You’re starting at the base layer — not venturing into areas outside the core technology. So it didn’t feel that crazy.
But what was surprising — and what came as a discovery over the following months — was that COVID hit. And suddenly I had to build a team in a completely different world than the one I knew, where you didn’t meet people in person. You had to get to know co-founders through Zoom and trust them through Zoom.
So the world changed at the exact same time.
And personally, I became pregnant literally the week after I resigned — which was like, okay…
Adi Ben-Ari :
Oh wow. Wow. Oh my goodness. Wow.
Clarisse Hagège:
So it was quite an experience.
So just to come back to that moment — it was like a double incubation. But what was interesting about the COVID part is that although it was a brand-new world you had to adapt to in terms of trust and building relationships, the world also slowed down.
For me, it was the perfect timing to deep dive into the tech we were leveraging — reading books about cryptography — and it gave me a longer period of incubation somehow.
But I was lucky as well to have my partner join me on this project. He’s a serial entrepreneur, so he helped me move much faster than I think I would have done myself. The beginnings are always more surprising than you think they should be.
Not just the beginnings — it’s every single step. But I do believe that the very first part, the zero-to-one, is the most challenging. Until you’ve actually done it, you don’t know exactly how to get there.
Adi Ben-Ari:
It’s interesting — there are a couple of things there. One is that you said it didn’t feel like a risk. It felt obvious that this is where things are going. I think that’s super interesting, because most entrepreneurs feel that way: “I’m not really making a bet — this is just where the world is heading.”
But the other side of that is, you could be right about where it’s going, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be your solution that wins.
Clarisse Hagège:
Right — so jumping into the idea was easy. But you’re right: execution is everything. The idea is the idea, the timing is important, but that’s not how you build a company. Execution is what matters.
Adi Ben-Ari:
And the other thought I had was about your co-founder. It must bring tons of real-world lessons and practical knowledge having someone who’s been through it before. What was his background?
Clarisse Hagège:
My co-founder is my husband. So yes — it’s truly a family business. The double incubation was exactly that.
He had previously started multiple companies. His background was in HR tech — completely different — but that’s also the beauty of our space. Hearing me talk every night about blockchain and how it was going to change the way we do any kind of financial exchange globally, he became convinced very quickly.
And I think it’s addictive. Once you start really understanding the potential of what you’re building, it becomes so addictive. So for him, it wasn’t hard at all to switch subjects — once you have the curiosity, you dive in.
And honestly, in 2020 there were very few blockchain experts — that’s the truth. And even today, I would argue there are still very few. So it wasn’t frightening to start something new, because yes, there were people more knowledgeable than us, but we also knew the learning curve would be fast, and that we could catch up on those five, eight, ten years we hadn’t spent in the space.
His background was mostly HR tech. And the first thing he did — six months after I started working on the project — was challenge me on the co-founders I had picked. They were very good on paper, but they had no founder material. They weren’t driven enough, they weren’t building because I hadn’t fundraised yet, and they were waiting for money to start building — which was a red flag.
He had had issues with co-founders in the past, so he knew exactly what to look for — how to pick the right people, how to build that association from the legal standpoint, what to give upfront, what to give after two years, how to structure the partnership so everyone is incentivised in the same direction.
This was super important, and I think to this day, most startups fail because of co-founder issues. The founding team splits or isn’t aligned. It’s very difficult.
For us, to make sure there would be no issue and that we would keep the ties strong — we made a second kid. That really incentivised us.
Adi Ben-Ari:
That’s so funny. I’m just thinking — are your kids aligned with funding rounds?
Clarisse Hagège:
Actually, this is a very good point. I was like, “There’s no way we’re making the second until we’ve secured the next round.” It was part of the business plan.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Amazing.
Clarisse Hagège:
The first one came during the pre-seed, and the second was conceived after the seed round — so I knew we had some visibility ahead of us.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Fantastic. And did you link their names to product versions or releases?
Clarisse Hagège:
We didn’t go that far.
Adi Ben-Ari:
I’m thinking like the Ethereum team — every time they bring out a release they use a name. I can see where you could take this.
Clarisse Hagège:
We didn’t go that far.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Okay, good. So Clarisse — what do you think gave you the edge in this market? You came in… what’s giving you the edge?
Clarisse Hagège:
I think it’s also what slowed us down in the beginning. Once again, we built for a market that was still slowly emerging. We didn’t build a dashboard-first solution for the existing market, which was crypto trading.
That was the mature use case back in 2019–2020, when Bitcoin went from 5K to 45K almost overnight. That’s what everyone wanted — VCs, asset managers — they wanted a dashboard to interact with. And we were building APIs.
So at the time, during the first two years, it was mostly building, not selling.
When we went to market, most of the early builders were in NFTs — loyalty programs, ticketing, games. So we started seeing players build on our product, but they weren’t the segment we originally had in mind. Coming from finance, we had built for financial use cases.
Even though our first client — and still a client today — was Nilos, a cross-border payment provider, which was already leveraging stablecoins very early on. But that was the exception. That was not where the hype was.
Why I’m telling you this is because what makes us unique today is that we spent the last five years building APIs. That slowed our adoption curve in the first three years, because the market was more focused on crypto trading rather than building financial infrastructure.
There was a lot of back-and-forth in capital markets: tokenisation was interesting but always too early. Chicken-and-egg again — clients don’t care about tokenising bonds unless it brings real efficiencies. But to see efficiencies, you need settlement on-chain, you need KYC embedded in smart contracts, and so on.
So we were always worried about VCs pushing for use cases that wouldn’t help us build the right product. But we focused on where the market actually was.
When people were building NFTs, we were enabling them to build NFT platforms. We had a few games at the time as well. And then when the crisis hit — after FTX — we refocused all our strength into building for the financial roadmap, which had always been our goal.
We accelerated that path.
And I would say the two catalysts last year were:
- The election of Trump, and
- Stripe acquiring Bridge.
Those were the two big market validations — plus a catalyst that brought the US market to the party. That really accelerated our growth.
Since last year, the market has built out and realised that the first use cases to scale are cash use cases: stablecoins, tokenised money markets, repos — places where you see efficiencies immediately and revenue opportunities right away.
Today, 60–70% of the volume on our platform is stablecoin-powered. Every month we process over two billion in transactions, and 60–70% of that is stablecoins.
So we’ve been well positioned to grow with those use cases — which, once again, is what we designed Dfns for.
Adi Ben-Ari:
And your clients — are they exchanges, banks, hedge funds, or all of the above?
Clarisse Hagège:
It’s a good question. Today we cater mostly to four use cases — but we really focus on two.
The first is custody: any regulated VASP or bank building custody solutions. That includes everything from the Zodia Custodys of this world, to large CSDs building custody capabilities internally, to neobanks who work with players like The Blocks and others.
This custody and treasury-management segment is scaling the fastest, and we’ll be announcing large institutions and interesting partnerships by the end of the year that will give us significant market share in this segment.
The second is payments. In payments, we work mostly with PSPs. I would say there are three sub-use-cases: cross-border payments, remittances, and global payroll.
We’ve seen trends around the large cross-border platforms like Bridge (acquired by Stripe), Iron (acquired by MoonPay), and others — many of whom started building with Dfns. Then the more traditional players followed as well.
Those two — custody and payments — are really the two areas we focus on, both commercially and in terms of roadmap.
After that, we also serve the tokenisation use case. The two or three main trends we see there are:
- tokenised money markets (we’re behind players like Spiko, Midas, and others),
- capital markets tokenisation platforms (Tokeny, Nomiks, RealAsset, AssetBlocks, and others),
- and stablecoin issuance (Circle, Agin, and others leveraging our platform).
And last — as I told you — we came to crypto trading use cases relatively late. As our products scaled and our APIs became more programmatic, we opened up to more crypto-trading use cases.
This includes exchanges and OTC brokers looking for programmatic usage of our platform.
So that’s the scope.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Okay, very good. And going back to that conviction you had at the beginning — that this is obvious and it’s going to play out — where is this going next?
Clarisse Hagège:
Honestly, the first three years were challenging. Back in 2020, I was convinced about the timing. I thought the time-to-market was now. And when Bitcoin went from 5 to 40, I thought, “This is it — it’s happening.”
Then FTX collapsed — and not just FTX, but all the collapses that year — and it set us back two or three years.
So the first three years were difficult. We were too early. Traditional players — the ones we had built for — weren’t coming to the table. They were afraid of the industry. Regulators were enforcing without ruling.
It was challenging.
But the last year and a half has been incredibly fun — because finally you see people building. We’re very much a tool behind the scenes. Where we feel the value is when those applications go live and into production.
When we started powering Bridge and saw their volume jumping from one month to another at a pace that was hard to believe, we were so excited — because that’s exactly what we enable.
We’re an enabler, and we want our clients to be successful. We need our clients to be successful. We want to start spreading these types of use cases.
So today, it’s more obvious than ever — there’s no going back. I’m even more optimistic now than I was five years ago.
I think not all use cases will advance at the same pace. And what we’re seeing over the past few months is that not all regions globally will advance at the same pace either.
Two years ago in Europe, we all thought, “For once, we’re going to be ahead of a revolution. This is it.”
We’ve lost that. It’s game over.
It took six months for the US to catch up — literally six months — and now the gap is huge. It’s going to be very hard to bridge.
We’re also starting to see the APAC markets moving as well. There has always been a vibrant startup and exchange ecosystem there, but now we see institutions — in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia — starting to adopt stablecoin use cases.
Adi Ben-Ari :
I was going to ask you about that — the geopolitics, which markets you serve, and how you see that shifting.
Until about a year and a half ago, Europe was our safe hub. We had quite a bit of growth there, and most of our clients were Europeans. Now that’s not the case at all.
The markets where we see the most opportunities — and the most activity — are the US and LATAM.
We’re opening Asia because we’ve had a lot of inbounds. Our Head of APAC officially joins in September, and we see a lot of opportunities there.
Adi Ben-Ari (00:23:37):
Where in Asia will you focus? Where will you set up?
Clarisse Hagège:
Hong Kong. We’re starting in Hong Kong, not Singapore. Regulators in Singapore have tightened up over the past months. It’s also a smaller market, and most of our competition is already there.
Hong Kong gives us an easier base to nurture the region.
We want to serve Southeast Asia because the potential for stablecoins is huge — Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam.
We think what we can do there is big. So if our opening goes well, that’s where we’ll double down.
We’ve also had our first major wins in the UAE. We’re going to be securing the Abu Dhabi stablecoin, which we’re very proud of, and that is opening quite a few doors in the region.
It’s a different market, but it’s very dynamic. Historically it’s been vibrant on the crypto-trading side, but now we’re seeing banks seriously addressing the technology.
So yes — everything but Europe, really.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Exactly.
Clarisse Hagège:
I’m exaggerating — but yeah.
Adi Ben-Ari:
It’s interesting hearing this from your angle because we can see the headlines — the announcements, the partnerships — but we can’t see what’s actually happening beneath. From your side, you see the adoption in real time. You see they’re buying the infrastructure, installing it, and actually using it.
Clarisse Hagège:
Yes. We’re not the largest player in the world — yet — but from Q1 to Q2 we multiplied the number of RFPs by twenty.
Just to give you an idea: this is traditional finance. And there has been such FOMO.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Yeah. Someone from a US bank told me that before the elections everything was shutting down, people were hesitant. And then the day after the election, from the very top: “What are we doing about this? What’s our strategy? Do we accept? Do we issue?” — a complete U-turn.
Clarisse Hagège:
Exactly. I don’t think there’s a single board of a regional bank in the US that didn’t have a call this summer asking:
“What do we do? Do we accept? Do we issue? What’s our strategy?”
The US market is going to move fast.
It’s also interesting because the US has historically followed rather than led on payments. FedNow is now up and running, but SEPA was a better network until 2020–21.
But I believe that in this new revolution — stablecoins — the US will absolutely lead.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Interesting. Definitely an interesting space to watch.
Before we go, I usually ask guests if they have anything to recommend — sources of information, great books you’ve read, things you listen to. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about this industry.
Clarisse Hagège:
Yes, of course. I always say that I’m very careful with my LinkedIn feed and how I curate it, because it’s an incredible source of information — even though it’s a bubble. It feels like the whole world is doing blockchain when it’s really not. But it’s still super interesting.
Apart from that — and just to stay on blockchain for a second — if you’re interested in cross-border payments and want to see how fast adoption is moving, I love Daniel Webber’s newsletter and anything he publishes with FXC Intelligence. It’s brilliant, very in-depth.
It’s funny — I’ve been following him for a while, and until a year ago, crypto and stablecoins didn’t appear in his newsletter more than once every six months. Right now, literally every week there’s something about stablecoins and their adoption. It’s super interesting.
For entrepreneurial guidance more than theoretical books, I really like biographies. I tend to read biographies of entrepreneurs — old stories, contemporary stories — I always find them inspiring. They show you how people build, how they maintain, and how they think long-term.
For example, one I’m reading these days isn’t about Silicon Valley at all — it’s about the founder of one of the largest cosmetics brands in the early 20th century. These stories are always relevant to building anything.
And yes, I listen to podcasts. I follow a few newsletters that make my days. That’s pretty much my recipe.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Amazing. Clarisse, it’s been great. Thank you very much for sharing your story with us and giving us your time. And like most guests we have here — because it feels like everything is changing so quickly — it would be great to catch up in the future and see where we are.
Clarisse Hagège (00:27:52):
Anytime. Yes.
Adi Ben-Ari:
Okay, great. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon.
Narrator (Intro):
Thanks for tuning in. Catch every episode wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Applied Blockchain on socials for the latest insights, and explore our Layer 2 Silent Data at silentdata.com.