Dfns Raises $16 Million to Expand Crypto Wallet Infrastructure

Dfns has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round to expand the adoption of its crypto wallet infrastructure for institutional clients.

The company’s efforts will focus on expansion among banks, payment services, trading platforms, investment apps, tokenization projects, government and corporate treasuries and fund administrators, primarily in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, Dfns said in a Tuesday (Jan. 14) press release.

“Our focus is to deliver world-class infrastructure for our FinTech clients,” Dfns CEO Clarisse Hagège said in the release. “They demand bank-grade security, smarter transaction management, direct integrations, and better user and developer experiences. This is what we do best, and it’s what we’ll keep delivering.”

Dfns shifted the focus of its wallet-as-a-service platform for crypto assets to institutional clients two years ago because these customers have a large share of the world’s liquidity and can therefore drive the adoption of crypto, according to the release.

To appeal to these customers, the company has positioned itself as “the most secure blockchain wallet infrastructure” and prioritized bank-grade security, per the release.

As of 2024, Dfns had more than 130 clients, supported 10 million wallets, and was securing and processing $1 billion in monthly transactions, globally, the company said in a Tuesday update on its website.

“While economic, operational and regulatory challenges led to some client turnover, Dfns has maintained an impressive 300% year-over-year growth since 2021,” the company said in the update. “This momentum is now fueled by a new wave of FinTech innovators — spanning trading, banking, payments, lending, investing, asset management, treasury and more — focused on delivering real economic value and tangible utility.”

Dfns was founded in 2020 and raised $13.5 million in seed funding in April 2022.

In another recent development in this space, Mastercard, MetaMask and Baanx said in August that they teamed up to launch a crypto-to-fiat card called the MetaMask Card that lets MetaMask wallet customers use crypto for everyday purchases in fiat currency wherever Mastercard is accepted.

In July, Visa and Tangem AG launched a collaboration that resulted in a Visa payments card combined with a hardware wallet that lets Tangem users make payments using their crypto or stablecoin balances at merchants that accept Visa.