Welcome Thierry Janaudy

Thierry joins Dfns at a time when blockchain infrastructure is moving from experimentation into core financial operations. Regulated institutions now require systems that are secure, compliant, modular, and deployable across diverse regulatory environments. As Head of Institutional Solutions, Thierry will partner with our product and engineering teams to design and operate digital asset infrastructure that meets the technical and operational realities of banks, payment institutions, brokers, funds, and other financial institutions worldwide.

A career at the intersection of finance and technology

Thierry brings more than two decades of experience building and operating mission-critical financial systems in highly regulated environments. Most recently, he served as CTO at Zodia Custody, where he led the strategic and technical direction of one of the most advanced institutional digital asset custodians in the market. His work spanned the full lifecycle of institutional crypto adoption, including secure custody, tokenization, DeFi, staking, trading, settlement, and smart contract management.

At Zodia, Thierry also played a key role in:

• Designing secure custody architectures for interaction with multiple blockchain protocols
• Enabling institutional-grade access to DeFi while maintaining strong risk controls
• Advancing compliance and risk frameworks, including co-designing OpenVASP
• Building governance, role-based access, and zero-trust security architectures
• Developing atomic on-chain settlement processes to reduce counterparty risk

Before Zodia, Thierry was CTO at Standard Chartered Ventures, where he led the architecture, design, and regulatory engagement for multiple ventures during their incubation phase, including initiatives around banking-as-a-service and digital asset custody. Earlier in his career, Thierry held senior leadership and engineering roles at Standard Chartered Bank, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, HSBC, and RBS, where he built large-scale pricing, trading, and e-FX systems used across global markets. His work includes designing real-time pricing engines, algorithmic trading frameworks, secure market connectivity, and high-performance systems operating at sub-millisecond latency.

This background gives Thierry a deep understanding of traditional financial market infrastructure, hands-on expertise with blockchain, digital assets, and custody, strong experience navigating regulatory, compliance, and risk constraints, and a pragmatic, production-first approach to system design.

Dfns is reinforcing its institutional product strategy

Dfns is building an operating system for blockchains. It is a middleware layer for regulated financial institutions that want to run their activities onchain. We are not building for a single market or a single workflow. We are building a one-to-many platform that helps organizations manage wallets and execute transactions across different environments.

Our clients include banks, fintechs, payment services, brokers, asset managers, and stablecoin issuers operating across multiple jurisdictions, regulatory regimes, and operating models. We do not believe there will be one “standard” way financial institutions adopt blockchains. History shows that companies too often fail when they assume their own model will become the norm. Instead, we see that the global financial stack is being rebuilt and redefined onchain each day, under very different constraints depending on geography, regulation, risk appetite, and legacy systems.

Our conviction is simple: Dfns must be composable enough to adapt to these constraints. This is the only way to accelerate the adoption of blockchains and enable a real transition away from the database-centric financial infrastructure that dominates today. Thierry’s arrival is central to this strategy. His experience designing and operating infrastructure inside major banks and custodians strengthens our ability to:

• Translate regulatory, risk, and operational requirements into clear, composable product primitives
• Design architectures that work in real bank and market environments, not just in theory
• Support complex deployment models across regions, legal entities, and regulatory frameworks
• Help institutions move from experimentation to reliable, scalable production systems

As Head of Institutional Solutions, Thierry will work closely with strategic clients and internal teams to ensure Dfns continues to meet the expectations of financial institutions in terms of security, governance, compliance, performance, and reliability, while remaining flexible enough to evolve with the market.

Throughout his career, Thierry has consistently balanced innovation with discipline, introducing new technologies without ignoring the realities of regulated finance. That mindset aligns with Dfns’ mission to make onchain infrastructure usable, adaptable, and trustworthy for the global financial system. 

We’re excited to have Thierry aboard and to build the next phase of institutional blockchain infrastructure.