When we started DFNS in 2020, we made one bet. That, over time, money would move from ledgers to blockchains. Not as a casino. As plumbing.
For a few years that sounded crazy. It doesn’t now. So we’re changing what we call ourselves. DFNS is no longer wallet infrastructure. It’s a core banking platform for digital assets. This post is about why, and about the thing we’re actually trying to build, which is stranger and more ambitious than a rebrand.
Notice where the money went
It’s easy to argue about whether crypto matters. It’s harder to argue with volume.
Stablecoins moved $27.6 trillion in transfer volume in 2024, surpassing the combined volumes of Visa and Mastercard.¹ A lot of that is automated trading, so adjust it down however you like, on Artemis’s stricter methodology it’s $18.4 trillion, still ahead of Visa’s $15.7 trillion and Mastercard’s $9.8 trillion.² Either way, a thing most people dismissed five years ago now moves more value than the two largest card networks on earth. And the supply of dollar-pegged stablecoins now exceeds $200 billion.³ Most of that isn’t trading. It’s people moving dollars.
It’s not just dollars. BlackRock launched a tokenized money-market fund and BUIDL has become the largest tokenized Treasury fund globally, with over $2.4 billion in assets,⁴ and people now post it as collateral. The broader tokenized U.S. Treasury sector is around $11 billion, and the total real-world-asset market hit roughly $26 billion, surpassing total value locked on decentralized exchanges for the first time.⁵
And the bank that’s supposedly skeptical? JPMorgan’s onchain unit, Kinexys, has processed more than $3 trillion in transactions since inception and averages more than $5 billion daily.⁶ Citi, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, all shipping tokenized products. Not whitepapers. Products.
The regulators noticed too, which is usually the last thing to happen. The Bank for International Settlements, about as far from a crypto cheerleader as exists, devoted a chapter of its 2025 Annual Economic Report to a financial system where central bank money, commercial bank money, and government bonds all live on the same programmable platforms.⁷ In the US, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, establishing the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins.⁸ And in Europe, the central bank stopped experimenting and started building: after running over 50 trials that settled nearly €1.6 billion in central bank money with more than 60 participants across nine jurisdictions,⁹ the ECB approved a plan to settle DLT transactions in central bank money, with a pilot, Pontes, launching by the end of Q3 2026.¹⁰
When the BIS and the Fed and BlackRock and the ECB are all moving in the same direction, the question stops being whether this happens. It’s what people build on.
The easy part and the hard part
The first decade of this was about access. Can a bank make a wallet, hold a key, touch a chain without losing the key or the bank? That was the whole game, and in that game a wallet was a small thing. Make a key, store it, sign with it. Fine.
That decade is over. The banks we talk to now don’t want a wallet. They want to run things. Issue a stablecoin. Service a tokenized deposit. Run a treasury. Settle a trade. Send money to another country in four seconds instead of four days.
And here’s what you learn the moment you try: signing the transaction is the easy part. It’s almost the whole pitch of every wallet company, and it’s the last 2% of the actual problem.
The other 98% is everything around that final signature. Checking a transaction against policy before it’s signed, not after. Knowing the counterparty isn’t sanctioned. Routing approvals the way your bank already routes them. Simulating the transaction, decoding it, managing nonces, rebroadcasting when it gets stuck, indexing it, reconciling it, and keeping an audit trail a regulator will accept. Governing not just people but service accounts and bots and, soon, agents, all under rules that don’t bend. Moving compliance out of the back office and into the moment the money moves. And so on and so forth.
That’s not a wallet. That’s a core banking system. A wallet asks: can you sign this? A core banking system asks: can you run a regulated financial business on this, with the same control you’d demand from anything else you operate? We decided to answer the second question.
Why nobody can just bolt this on
The systems banks run today were not built for any of this. They were built for ledgers, batches, and end-of-day reconciliation. A lot of them are written in COBOL and settle overnight.
Blockchains are the opposite in every dimension. Real-time. Final in seconds. Public by default. You can’t staple that to a batch system and call it done. Settlement, custody, authorization, compliance, they all move next to the transaction. The architecture has to change.
That’s a lot of work, and it’s the kind of work banks shouldn’t do themselves, for the same reason they don’t write their own core banking system. They buy Temenos or FIS or Finastra and build on top. We think digital assets need the same thing: one core system, built properly, by people who do nothing else. So everyone else can build their product instead of rebuilding cryptography they’ll get wrong at least once.
The line we won’t cross
There’s one rule we built into the company, and it explains a lot of our decisions.
We are the layer between a regulated institution and the chains. We are not a custodian, a broker, or a bank. We hold no license that puts us in front of your customers. We will never compete with the people we sell to.
This is not a throwaway line, because most of our competitors do the opposite. They hold licenses, custody assets, and sell financial products straight to end users. Which means they sit inside the same perimeter as their own customers, and eventually, across the table from them on the same deal.
We chose the other path on purpose. No custody. No end customer. No license that competes with yours. Fiserv never opened a bank to compete with its clients. Neither will we. The market has enough infrastructure companies quietly pretending to be banks. Our customers don’t need another competitor. They need a core they can build on and trust not to turn on them.
What we’re really building
Now the part we actually care about.
Right now you have two kinds of money and they live in different universes. One is a wallet address: it settles in seconds, anywhere, all the time. The other is a bank account, reached through an IBAN, settling through correspondent banks that still take days and still close on the weekend. Nobody wants two universes. People just want money that works.
We want to merge them. Our goal is to let a regulated institution issue an IBAN that is also a programmable onchain account. One number. Fiat rails and blockchain rails behind it. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and ordinary balances under the same account, the same policies, the same audit trail.
It sounds small when you say it like that. It isn’t. An IBAN that’s also an onchain account is the point where the two financial systems stop being two systems. It’s how a fintech in Lagos and a bank in Frankfurt and a treasury desk in Singapore end up on the same rails without ripping out what they have. It’s money that moves the way information moves on the internet: instantly, programmatically, everywhere, and still under control.
That’s the thing we’re building toward. The rebrand is just us saying it out loud so you can hold us to it.
The next ten years
The bar for this infrastructure is about to jump. As real instruments move onto these rails, key management stops being a technical detail and becomes critical infrastructure. Where your keys live, who can reach them, whether you can swap providers, whether it survives a region going down, these turn from preferences into requirements in a procurement document.
And there’s a new kind of user coming. Not people. Treasury systems, trading engines, compliance tools, ERPs, payment orchestrators, settlement networks, support bots, agents, all of them initiating and approving and executing financial actions. That only works if the system was built around identity, permissions, and policy for machines as well as humans.
We built for this from the start. Authentication, policy, and signing are separate layers. It runs as SaaS, hybrid, or fully on your premises. It supports MPC, HSM, TEE, and offline signing. Compliance sits in the path of the transaction, not in a report you read afterward.
A wallet is a place to sign. A core banking system is a programmable trust system. The institutions that do well over the next decade will be the ones that saw that difference early and kept their options open.
What changes for you
New logo, new site, a product story organized around what you actually run instead of a feature list.
What doesn’t change: your APIs, integrations, contracts, and SLAs all keep working. The new look will roll across the site, dashboard, and docs over the coming weeks. You don’t have to do anything.
We built this with our clients and our team, so it reflects where we are and where this is going.
Get started on DFNS today: app.dfns.io
Sources
- CEX.IO, Stablecoin Landscape: What 2024 Reveals About 2025 — $27.6 trillion in 2024 transfer volume, surpassing Visa and Mastercard combined by 7.68%; ~70% bot-driven. blog.cex.io
- Visual Capitalist / Artemis Analytics, Stablecoins Are Now Bigger Than Visa or Mastercard (Nov 2025) — adjusted $18.4T vs Visa $15.7T and Mastercard $9.8T. visualcapitalist.com
- Ainvest, Stablecoins Surpass Visa, Mastercard in 2024 Transactions (Jun 2025) — dollar-pegged stablecoin supply exceeds $200 billion. ainvest.com
- RWA.xyz, BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) — live AUM and fund data. app.rwa.xyz; see also Securitize, BUIDL Surpasses $1B in AUM. securitize.io
- The Crypto Times, BlackRock Tokenized Treasury Filings 2026 (May 2026) — BUIDL ~$2.5B, tokenized Treasuries ~$11B, total RWA ~$26B surpassing DEX TVL. cryptotimes.io
- J.P. Morgan, Kinexys 2026 Milestones (Apr 2026) — $3 trillion+ processed since inception, $5 billion+ daily average. jpmorgan.com
- Bank for International Settlements, Annual Economic Report 2025, Chapter III (“The next-generation monetary and financial system”). bis.org
- The White House, Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Signs GENIUS Act into Law (Jul 18, 2025). whitehouse.gov; Mayer Brown, GENIUS Act Signed into Law. mayerbrown.com
- European Central Bank, Making wholesale central bank money fit for the digital age (Nov 2025) — 50+ trials, nearly €1.6B settled, 60+ participants across nine jurisdictions. ecb.europa.eu
- European Central Bank, ECB commits to DLT settlement plans with dual-track strategy (Jul 1, 2025) — Pontes pilot by end of Q3 2026; Appia long-term track. ecb.europa.eu; see also the Pontes programme page. ecb.europa.eu