Welcome Giulio Pezzulli

We're excited to announce that Giulio Pezzulli has joined Dfns as Principal Software Engineer. Giulio brings nearly a decade of experience building production systems at the intersection of cryptocurrency custody, payments infrastructure, and blockchain protocols, having shipped code at companies including Trustology (now Bitpanda), Circle, and Caduceus Foundation. His background is an unusually direct match for what Dfns builds and the clients we serve.

From crypto custody to payments rails

Giulio's first full-time engineering role was at Trustology, where he spent two years building an end-to-end cryptocurrency custodial wallet from the ground up. Trustology was later acquired and is now Bitpanda Custody. He worked across microservices architecture on AWS. He ran his own blockchain nodes for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance Chain, built the chain indexers powering transaction history and notifications, integrated with exchange APIs from Kraken, BitMEX, and Coinbase, and shipped the Vue.js frontend alongside MetaMask browser extension integration. This is exactly the problem space Dfns operates in, and having shipped a production custody platform end-to-end gives Giulio a depth of context about wallet operations, key management, and chain integration that is rare to find.

He then moved to Circle, where for a year and a half he worked in Java on integrating payments rails into the Circle API. The work spanned card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex), ACH, Wires, and SEPA, alongside banking partners including Checkout.com and Silvergate. The role sits directly in the territory where traditional payments and digital assets converge, which is where our clients are building.

Blockchain protocols and a CTO practice

Giulio then took on a Principal Software Engineer role at Caduceus Foundation, where he led the technical effort behind the Caduceus Metaverse Protocol, a layer-one EVM-compatible blockchain. He architected and built the token bridge, NFT bridge, wrapped CMP portal, open-source starter kits, and developer documentation, while integrating with oracles, stablecoins, and SDK infrastructure. Beyond the code, he managed hiring, the budget, and the technical roadmap, and represented the project at events in London, Malta, and Hong Kong.

In parallel, Giulio has been running Voltaire Labs, providing CTO-as-a-service to startups across fintech, payments, AI, and blockchain. The portfolio is wide: rebuilding a Node.js microservices backend on Railway with full CI/CD, architecting a React Native learning product with agentic pipelines using Gemini Video and ElevenLabs, building real-time voice-to-voice AI products on OpenAI's Realtime API, and shipping a fantasy sports analytics platform with Temporal orchestration and Python OCR services. Earlier, he also operated in venture as an analyst at NextBlock VC, sourcing and conducting due diligence on Seed and Series A blockchain investments.

What Giulio will build at Dfns

At Dfns, Giulio will work across our engineering organization on the platform that powers wallet operations, transaction lifecycle management, and key orchestration for our clients. The combination he brings is unusual: production custody experience from Trustology, payments rails fluency from Circle, layer-one protocol depth from Caduceus, and the breadth of system design judgment that comes from running an engineering consultancy across very different problem shapes.

Given how much of our roadmap sits at the intersection of custody, payments, and onchain execution, Giulio joins at exactly the right moment. We're excited to have him on board.

We're hiring

Dfns continues to grow across commercial, engineering, product, and operations. If you're interested in building infrastructure for the next generation of financial systems, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply here: jobs.deel.com/job-boards/dfns