Speaker 1: Hey, folks, we're recording at Halburne's Access Summit at the
Speaker 1: New York Stock Exchange and joining me, it's Chris de Fontaine,
Speaker 1: who is the co CEO and co founder of Defense. Chris,
Speaker 1: great to have you.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me, Tony.
Speaker 1: Chris. Defense is doing some amazing things and I'm excited
Speaker 1: to go through the details. Let's keep it off with
Speaker 1: your background. Tell us about where you're from and how'd
Speaker 1: you make your way into crypto.
Speaker 2: I'm a European. I'm half French, half Swedish, so I
Speaker 2: grew grew up in Paris, lived a bit in South Africa,
Speaker 2: spent a lot of years in Sweden and Stockholm. So
Speaker 2: I had this multicultural background, but mostly European. And yeah,
Speaker 2: studied philosophy in France and then dropped out and just
Speaker 2: built companies. The first companies were in hr tech and
Speaker 2: sports Tech, did social apps around multiple experiments, not all
Speaker 2: of them were were successful, but we did raise money,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. And then all suddenly I met
Speaker 2: my wife, Clarius, who's my co founder, and she she's
Speaker 2: been in banking for ten years Goldman Bammel, Credit Agricole,
Speaker 2: mostly here in New York and you know, she she
Speaker 2: stumbled upon private key security matters and blockchain while working
Speaker 2: for the bank, and but she had never built a company.
Speaker 2: And so we kind of met, uh somewhere in the
Speaker 2: middle where you know, she would bring the industry expertise
Speaker 2: and I would be, you know, kind of tickled by
Speaker 2: the idea of joining her. Was intimidating at first because
Speaker 2: you know, like cybersecurity and finance and crypto like had
Speaker 2: nothing to do with that whole space. Being in the
Speaker 2: consumer facing product side very deep b to be very
Speaker 2: deep tech. And but you know, I know, I knew
Speaker 2: how to hire, I knew how to fundraise, I knew
Speaker 2: how to build a deck, I knew how to feel
Speaker 2: how an organization should kind of evolve over time. And
Speaker 2: so yeah, my operational expertise mixed with her financial industry
Speaker 2: expertise kind of came together and we built a company.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. So tell us about defenses services and what
Speaker 1: you offer and solutions and things like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're in the product category that this industry refers
Speaker 2: to as wallet infrastructure wallet services. What it basically is
Speaker 2: is the combination of a key management service. Traditionally speaking,
Speaker 2: so keys your private keys right that we secure or
Speaker 2: that we help you secure. And the notes the notes
Speaker 2: of a blockchain that we index so you can read
Speaker 2: information from it, you can write information to it. So
Speaker 2: that's like the kind of core objects of a wallet.
Speaker 2: And what we do is provide an interface on top
Speaker 2: of these objects as well, so that the developer experience
Speaker 2: and also the kind of user experience becomes pleasurable and
Speaker 2: safe with authentication and identity and access management and authentication.
Speaker 2: So it's like over time you add all these integrations.
Speaker 2: We've done as well with exchanges so that these wallets
Speaker 2: can buy and sell with compliance data, so that you know,
Speaker 2: these wallets, these same wallets can block transactions when they
Speaker 2: see some frauduenent address with payment service providers when they
Speaker 2: want to send these wallets want to send money to
Speaker 2: Brazil or whatever. It's becoming overtime and orchestration platform. We've
Speaker 2: like evolved into some kind of operating system, a middleware
Speaker 2: that sits within banks, within payment service providers, trading apps,
Speaker 2: all robinhood things like that. And so yeah, we've become
Speaker 2: with now three hundred more customer of three hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty customers, we've become like a a credible platform that
Speaker 2: helps you interact with blockchains and build your workflows.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. And your wallet as a service product is
Speaker 1: that pretty much plug and play any institution or exchange
Speaker 1: what American use your service and build their wallets out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, historically it was. It still is because if you're
Speaker 2: a startup, very cloud first using the most modern technologies,
Speaker 2: et cetera, that's what you want. You want an SDK,
Speaker 2: you want quick access to everything, self served motions, you
Speaker 2: want all of that. And that's what we have. That's
Speaker 2: what we built to start with. But as we got
Speaker 2: in deeper and deeper into institutional finance, we also realized that,
Speaker 2: you know, you had a lot of companies out there
Speaker 2: that had custom builds, legacy technologies, old stuff, complex stuff,
Speaker 2: much more regulatory requirements, security risk, compliance requirements than a
Speaker 2: young fintech starting two years ago. And yeah, you have
Speaker 2: to play ball with these guys if you want to
Speaker 2: kind of help them join the unschain world and make
Speaker 2: a buck, right, So you need to. We had to
Speaker 2: over time become this platform that's also good at deploying
Speaker 2: in various we call them heat your genius environments. But
Speaker 2: you know, like quirky environments, not your like just aws autobahn.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like, let's take an example, a bank
Speaker 2: in Turkey. They don't have any WIST data centure, yet
Speaker 2: the regulator will tell them, you need to have this
Speaker 2: mission critical stuff running in my country under certain like
Speaker 2: parameters and certain things. And you need to be aware
Speaker 2: of these parameters. You need to know what the regulators want,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. And it's all about sovereignty of
Speaker 2: that country, risk tolerance from their perspective, the Turkish perspective,
Speaker 2: or the South Korean one or whatever. So yeah, we've
Speaker 2: became good at that too.
Speaker 1: And are you seeing a lot of demand now that
Speaker 1: let's say crypto is in a much better place here
Speaker 1: in the United States. A lot of institutions on Wall Street,
Speaker 1: even in New York Stock is launching things that they're
Speaker 1: coming to you saying, hey, Chris, we need to get
Speaker 1: this billed.
Speaker 2: Out one percent. There are still you know, the Clarity Act,
Speaker 2: et cetera. There are still hurdles, there's still a refinement.
Speaker 2: But I'm I mean, I have the luxury to have
Speaker 2: been in this space for six years now, so I've
Speaker 2: gone through you know, uh, the early days where the
Speaker 2: word custody was a devilish, diabolical term than the nft
Speaker 2: D five summer. Then you know FTX the whole thing, right,
Speaker 2: So I remember a year ago before Trump, when like
Speaker 2: no one wanted to even hear about the word crypto anymore.
Speaker 2: One year later, one must admit everything's changed. So from
Speaker 2: that perspective, yes, we see a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of financial institutions across the board in every single country.
Speaker 2: The use case have matured, they have definitely. Blockchain is
Speaker 2: seen as just now, you know, interesting technology and and
Speaker 2: and the mindset is open, and it's like, what can
Speaker 2: we do with this interesting technology? How can we rewire
Speaker 2: the financial back end? Because at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: blockchain is first and foremost an invitation to revamp rewire
Speaker 2: the back end, the back office of finance. Right people,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's easy to get caught in the shiny
Speaker 2: aspects of consumer facing products and you know, the latest
Speaker 2: ux and whatever. The truth is the biggest value in
Speaker 2: where you have the most work still to be done.
Speaker 2: Much like you know, you look at a country, you
Speaker 2: still want you want to work, You want to build
Speaker 2: the roads and the bridges, before you start working on
Speaker 2: you know, the Louis Vuitton shop, you know, like you
Speaker 2: got to get there. Yeah, exactly. So we're in that
Speaker 2: phase historically where the big kind of groundwork still has
Speaker 2: to be done. And and yeah, I mean IBM is
Speaker 2: like a big, big example of that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: The fact that we sign this partnership that took six
Speaker 2: months to deliver, which is a fairly short time amount
Speaker 2: of time frame for such a large company that runs
Speaker 2: seventy percent of the Internet and has been around for
Speaker 2: one hundred and fourteen years old, fourteen years for that
Speaker 2: company to sign with us and white label our entire
Speaker 2: platform and sell it as their own is Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: a phenomenal change compared to a year ago.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely. And that's called the IBM Digital Asset Haven
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, correct, So tell us about that,
Speaker 1: you know, what are as much as you can what
Speaker 1: are the moving parts and components of that? How are
Speaker 1: they using your services and how are they pitching that
Speaker 1: to their clients?
Speaker 2: So they have a long standing history uh in bock chain, right,
Speaker 2: like IBM has been at the forefront. They have been
Speaker 2: investing in what we call the hyper Ledger Foundation. Yes,
Speaker 2: they built the fabric private chain, so you know, they
Speaker 2: know their their thing, they know their stuff. Now what's
Speaker 2: happened is that they they've been partnering with a bunch
Speaker 2: of classic wallet vendors over the years, fire Blogs and
Speaker 2: Mettaco that got acquired by Ripple, Custody, uh Taurus and others.
Speaker 2: Attaka got acquired by Ripple, and they created some some issues,
Speaker 2: let's say with with you know, how to continue because
Speaker 2: when a when a financial service like Ripple acquires you know,
Speaker 2: credibly neutral technology provider, all suddenly all the other financial
Speaker 2: services on top they you know, they'll start looking at
Speaker 2: that very same piece of tech that is now governed
Speaker 2: by and another financial service with another pair of glasses.
Speaker 2: You know. It's just the risk paradigm shifts that has
Speaker 2: led IBM to look for their new champion. And we
Speaker 2: were one of the names that popped up and we
Speaker 2: started working with them, and and they thought that we
Speaker 2: were the most advanced but also the team that was
Speaker 2: not not a team that was too big, that could
Speaker 2: not consider their requirements. So we we were at we
Speaker 2: had at the right level, I would say, because we
Speaker 2: were willing to put in the legwork and and yeah,
Speaker 2: fast forward the digitalast to haven platform is is our
Speaker 2: platform running inside the IBM infrastructure, which means that you know,
Speaker 2: if you're a bank and you look to start moving
Speaker 2: things on chain, your trades, your flows, your your cash,
Speaker 2: your deposit, you want tokenize them, whatever you want to do,
Speaker 2: you now you know you need to think about multiple things.
Speaker 2: Among these things is vendor onboarding. Vendor on boarding takes time.
Speaker 2: You know, you need to go through a whole list
Speaker 2: of hold a big checklist. The procurement team is very
Speaker 2: strict and if you don't take all these boxes, you
Speaker 2: don't get in and it could take six, nine, twelve
Speaker 2: months to onboard a new vendor. So you know, when
Speaker 2: you're in a rush in these kind of markets, a
Speaker 2: thing like IBM that's already pre onboarded as a certified vendor,
Speaker 2: has been for a long time, takes all the boxes.
Speaker 2: Everyone's very happy because it's just like a new line
Speaker 2: in the contract they've already signed and bingo there off
Speaker 2: to the races. So that's like one of one important
Speaker 2: like go to market distribution adoption aspect to this whole thing,
Speaker 2: the trust because like you know, work startup, we could
Speaker 2: get acquired fireblocks even that eight billion dollar valuation on
Speaker 2: paper could get acquired. So IBM has been the long
Speaker 2: for one hundred and fourteen years old. They're making more
Speaker 2: than sixty billion dollars a year in revenue. They're not
Speaker 2: going anywhere, right, and so I mean to some degree,
Speaker 2: IBM is you know what bitcoin itself would like to
Speaker 2: be in one hundred years, you know. So from in
Speaker 2: some sense, it's like if IBM gets in the mother
Speaker 2: the bedrock is now like on chain, on chain compatible,
Speaker 2: gives gives you access to the on So that trust,
Speaker 2: that level of comfort for an institution like City, JP, Morgan, Swift,
Speaker 2: whatever is like gold right because now it's like all
Speaker 2: lights are green, we can go ahead. From a technical perspective,
Speaker 2: then of course they need to deal with their regulator
Speaker 2: and so forth and so, but you know, it's a
Speaker 2: big percentage of the loading bar that's now all good.
Speaker 2: So so they have They do have a lot of
Speaker 2: products in their catalog HSMs classes like their their well
Speaker 2: known HSMs, their confidential compute called HPVs. They have a
Speaker 2: thing called Offline Signing Orchestrator OZO, which helps you kind
Speaker 2: of keep things offline and if you want to go
Speaker 2: online with data like keys, there's a SaaS kind of
Speaker 2: there are circuit breakers and interesting things that will not
Speaker 2: prevent direct like offline to online movements, but it's going
Speaker 2: to be segregated and it's going to kind of follow
Speaker 2: a lot of security hygiene steps, and we're trying to
Speaker 2: make sure that our platform is completely compatible with their
Speaker 2: the entire product catalog running inside iBIM cloud and IBM environments,
Speaker 2: which is I would say, and I'll stop there. It's
Speaker 2: like the I would say, the it's the you know
Speaker 2: when we met with IBM, I didn't know them that well,
Speaker 2: Like you know, the kind of cliche picture you have
Speaker 2: of them as a startup or is like it's a
Speaker 2: dusty company, it's an old company. You know. The truth
Speaker 2: is I was impressed because especially when you go to
Speaker 2: that in Poukeepsi, you go to that quantum farm they
Speaker 2: have like it's not dusty at all. It's actually the
Speaker 2: thing that's like they invented the computer in the sixties.
Speaker 2: You know, they helped Armstrom go to the Moon with
Speaker 2: their computers and they're still investing as no other company
Speaker 2: on Earth on AI and Quantum and all the stuff
Speaker 2: that's like Frontier and even Google is not like at
Speaker 2: the same level. But the thing is what people don't
Speaker 2: understand is IBM is Ferrari, Google, Aws and all these
Speaker 2: others are mid class cars. It's like Ford, right, so
Speaker 2: of course maybe Ford is making more money than Ferrari,
Speaker 2: probably right, and for people know them more because they're everywhere,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Not everyone has a Ferrari. But the thing
Speaker 2: is like the level of the compute of a mainframe,
Speaker 2: those big machines that you buy, they cost a million plus.
Speaker 2: It's like buying a nice pair of shoes that you'll
Speaker 2: keep for ten years versus like a pair of Nikes
Speaker 2: that you'll kill in two years. That's the difference. Like
Speaker 2: it's when you buy IBM, you buy autonomy, you buy sovereignty.
Speaker 2: You buy the ability for your country, for your government,
Speaker 2: for your bank, for healthcare, for like all the mission
Speaker 2: critical infrastructure pieces in our societies, military, whatever, finance is
Speaker 2: part of those. You buy the ability to be able
Speaker 2: to compute inside your offices, inside your data data centers,
Speaker 2: inside your country with incredible, incredible high speed and compute power.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the rate shows, but like one IBM
Speaker 2: Z can compute as much as like one thousand service
Speaker 2: inside a do lists something like that, right, So it's
Speaker 2: a piece of jewelry. And it makes sense that IBM technology,
Speaker 2: which is one of the biggest, you know, enterprise tech
Speaker 2: firms in the world, gets into this. As we are
Speaker 2: moving from databases to blockchains, they want to be part
Speaker 2: of that transition as well and help right Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, And do you feel that's a model kind
Speaker 1: of where they've taken your technology, Like you mentioned, they
Speaker 1: have the brand, they have the relationships, the network already,
Speaker 1: they go out there and then they have their clients
Speaker 1: adopted the technology and that helps to bring in customers
Speaker 1: and retail folks on chain.
Speaker 2: Totally. I'm I am one hundred percent convinced and they
Speaker 2: are too that IBM is not only just a vendor.
Speaker 2: It's an unlocker, it's a it's an enabler, it's a bridge.
Speaker 2: It's really this thing that will have it perfer formative
Speaker 2: effect on the increased adoption of blockchains, for sure.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so, Chris, what's on your roadmap for this year?
Speaker 2: Well, we have we have a bunch of things. I
Speaker 2: would say, I would say it's it's it's becoming you know,
Speaker 2: we provide a unified experience across fifty plus blockchains, and
Speaker 2: then if you add the third party services like chinelysis
Speaker 2: coin based this and that, it's like one hundred plus
Speaker 2: external sources, the networks of the chains and the third
Speaker 2: party apps. You know, it's becoming increasingly increasingly important for
Speaker 2: our customers to have a great admin experience. Right, we're
Speaker 2: very inspired by what Whiz did for cloud. So Whiz
Speaker 2: is this cloud security company that got acquired a year
Speaker 2: ago by Google Record high evaluation, and they formulated this
Speaker 2: nice like proposition which is to create an orchestration layer
Speaker 2: on top of Google Cloud Aws Azure. Because it's difficult
Speaker 2: when you have when you when you have all these
Speaker 2: users and you have these rules and access controls, et cetera,
Speaker 2: entrenched in all these environments across an organization, with different
Speaker 2: teams in different countries, et cetera, it's very hard to
Speaker 2: manage all of that. So just with sits on top
Speaker 2: as an orchestration layer and they help you troubleshoot in
Speaker 2: real time. They give you like idiot proof, like you know,
Speaker 2: colors and experiences to know that oh, you know, there's
Speaker 2: a bug here, or there's something that needs to get
Speaker 2: checked here, or something has broken in my own automation,
Speaker 2: et cetera. We think that you know the complexity of
Speaker 2: blockchains and where a key sit and where notes it
Speaker 2: and how transactions the status of transactions are they pending, confirmed,
Speaker 2: have they failed, whatever, All of that complexity and more
Speaker 2: needs to be managed, and you need to provide this
Speaker 2: nice developer experience, but also admin experience because the bank
Speaker 2: is not only the devs, right, it's the portfolio manager,
Speaker 2: it's the risk officer, it's the CISO, it's the trader.
Speaker 2: So you have all these teams like sometimes in different
Speaker 2: countries and different subsidiaries of the bank, with the need
Speaker 2: for segregation of like you know, all these these environments,
Speaker 2: all these things, all these objects. So we're we're increasingly
Speaker 2: looking at providing that increase that enhanced admin experience for blockchains, transaction,
Speaker 2: life cycle management, all these things. Security has always been
Speaker 2: a big thing, will continue to be. We love as
Speaker 2: much as we love the idea of deploying on prem
Speaker 2: and as much as it's a regulatory requirement, are our secrets.
Speaker 2: Our little passion is to keep working on the zero
Speaker 2: trust SaaS. So yeah, we'll want to kind of provide
Speaker 2: as much data integrity and security as possible over time.
Speaker 1: That's exciting. Well, Chris, we're gonna have to do around two.
Speaker 1: We talked about it, where we go more adapt into
Speaker 1: all these things. But thank you so much and I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to the updates.
Speaker 2: Thank you much, Thank you.
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