Dfns Partners with UDPN

With this year’s regulatory green light around the world, the infrastructure race for tokenized deposits has started. Major global banks are moving from pilots to production, and the foundational question they are facing is not just which technology to use, but who controls it.

Today, Dfns is announcing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Universal Digital Payments Network (UDPN), a leading infrastructure provider for regulated digital currency management and interoperability. The partnership establishes a framework for integrating Dfns' institutional wallet infrastructure into UDPN's stack, delivering a secure, scalable, and compliant foundation for financial institutions operating regulated stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and CBDCs, deployable entirely on-premise, with full key portability and zero vendor lock-in.

Dfns brings the institutional wallet infrastructure

Tokenized deposits are gaining serious momentum. Unlike stablecoins, tokenized deposits represent direct claims on bank balance sheets, making them uniquely attractive to institutions that need compliance, liquidity efficiency, and seamless continuity with existing payment rails. They are not a parallel system, they are an extension of the existing one.

But that continuity comes with high expectations. Banks applying production-grade standards to tokenized deposit infrastructure need cryptographic security, governance, and sovereignty controls that match everything else they already operate. Off-the-shelf solutions built for “crypto-native” environments fall short. This is the gap the Dfns and UDPN partnership is designed to close.

Dfns provides the institutional wallet infrastructure, meaning the secure wallet management, policy-governed signing, workflow orchestration, and transaction lifecycle management across cloud, hybrid, and fully on-premise estates. Built as a component-agnostic platform which treats all core objects (e.g., keys, nodes, ledgers, identities, etc.) as interchangeable, Dfns enables to preserve bank-grade compliance, security and IT risk standards so financial institutions can interact with blockchains with peace of mind.

Since 2020, Dfns has helped fintechs and financial institutions manage digital asset operations and build applications onchain. Our programmable wallet platform brings together transaction lifecycle, internal workflow, policies and governance, key management, and third-party service orchestration into one secure control plane for custody, payments, trading, tokenization and banking use cases. Today, Dfns is trusted by over 400 companies including Standard Chartered Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, IBM, Broadridge, Apex Group, Stripe, Kraken, Circle, Susquehanna, and many more.

The four services central to this partnership are:

• Wallets-as-a-Service (WaaS): Programmable wallet creation and management across 60+ blockchain networks, purpose-built for institutional-scale digital currency operations.
• Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM): Full transaction lifecycle orchestration across all blockchain networks with deterministic nonce management and compliance.
• Wallet Entitlement Management (WEM): Granular governance, WebAuthn/FIDO2 authentication, and M-of-N approval workflows.
• Key Orchestration Service (KOS): MPC- or HSM-based key generation, distribution, and signing with native key import and export APIs, ensuring institutions retain full ownership and portability of their signing material.

UDPN brings the institutional messaging infrastructure

UDPN brings a different but equally critical layer: the messaging infrastructure that enables interoperability among regulated payment rails, enterprise systems, and core banking systems. Understanding what UDPN is, and the depth of what it represents, matters here.

UDPN was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2023, the result of over two years of development by a consortium that included global IT solutions provider GFT Technologies and decentralized cloud infrastructure company Red Date Technology. At its launch, leading global banks including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, The Bank of East Asia, and Akbank were already participating in discussions and early proof-of-concept work, a signal of how seriously the initiative was taken from day one.

The four services central to this partnership are:

• Tokenized Deposit & Stablecoin Management: Purpose-built for commercial banks and payment companies to manage regulated digital currency systems across all major public and permissioned blockchains, covering the full token lifecycle from issuance and distribution to circulation and redemption.
• Token-Based Core Banking Integration: Native connectivity between UDPN and existing core banking systems, allowing institutions to manage regulated digital currencies within their current operational environment without rebuilding from scratch.
• Decentralized Messaging Backbone: A permissioned, DLT-underpinned network of Validator Nodes, Transaction Nodes, and Business Nodes that enables interoperability between regulated stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and CBDCs while keeping shared data to a strict minimum to preserve user privacy.
• Transaction Audit & Reporting Nodes: Onchain infrastructure that facilitates the work of regulators and auditors in monitoring transactions of their respective digital currencies, providing the auditability and transparency that regulated institutions require by design.

The company behind UDPN's development and operations is Red Date Technology, a Hong Kong-headquartered technology firm founded in 2014 and a leading early player in the development of enterprise-scale blockchain infrastructure in Asia Pacific. Red Date Technology has since expanded its infrastructure focus internationally, co-developing UDPN as part of a broader vision to make regulated digital currency interoperability a reality at global scale.

Together, the two layers form a complete stack: wallet infrastructure and transaction governance from Dfns, interoperability and token lifecycle management from UDPN.

Sovereignty is the end-architecture

For most of banking history, sovereignty over critical infrastructure was assumed. Banks owned their systems, their data, their operations. The question of who controlled the underlying technology was rarely asked because the answer was always obvious.

Onchain infrastructure has complicated that assumption. As banks begin integrating digital asset operations into their core architecture, they are increasingly dependent on third-party providers for functions that sit dangerously close to money movement, key control, and transaction execution. In many cases, the vendor holds the keys (literally). Custody dependencies, opaque signing environments, and lock-in through proprietary data formats have become the hidden cost of moving fast.

The integrated Dfns and UDPN solution is designed around a different principle: the institution owns everything, from day one, by architecture. Banks deploying the combined stack can run their wallet infrastructure, governance engine, and signing environment entirely within their own environment, on-premise if required, in their own cloud if preferred. There is no persistent dependency on a vendor-hosted service. No sub-custodian relationship sitting beneath the institution's own license. No proprietary format that makes exit painful.

Keys are portable and exportable by design through Dfns' explicit key import and export APIs. Policies, entitlements, and transaction history are accessible and structured for migration. If an institution decides to evolve its architecture, it can do so without rebuilding from scratch or negotiating its way out of a contract designed to prevent exactly that.

In a world where wallet infrastructure is becoming a critical system, not a sidecar, that clarity matters more than any feature on a comparison grid.

What comes next

The MOU between Dfns and UDPN marks the beginning of a deeper technical and commercial collaboration. As tokenized deposit infrastructure moves from a strategic priority to an operational one for banks worldwide, the demand for production-ready, sovereign, and fully integrated stacks will only grow.

Contact us to learn more about the partnership: sales@dfns.co