In May 2021, Simone Mazzuca was on the telephone from Dubai, having just stepped off a plane. It is a useful entrance for a financier whose professional interests have rarely stayed within one border. The interview described him as speaking five languages. He was trying to explain a sixth sort of language: how money might travel between a bank account and a digital wallet without leaving its owner stranded somewhere in between.
His explanation reached back to the mechanical credit-card imprinter, the contraption that slid over a card and transferred its details through carbon paper. Before describing the future, he asked his interviewer to remember that distinctly unglamorous machine. Finance has always required a little machinery behind its manners.
Today, his story contains a more demanding question. The founder of Wallex and creator of EURST has argued for easier movement of money. Later warnings and reported investor disputes put the institutions handling that movement under scrutiny. The ambition and the obligations travel together.
A financier with a departure gate
Mazzuca came to cryptocurrency through traditional finance. His published professional biography describes consulting, investment and credit advice, and work managing relationships with private and institutional clients in Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom. Wallex’s own materials put that experience at more than 25 years. It is the background he brings to his account of the business, rather than a claim that he arrived as a programmer with a new monetary theory.
His earlier career also took him to Spain’s Canary Islands, where a company biography describes work attracting private capital and promoting tax advantages for businesses with Italian and Anglo-Saxon connections. Bulgaria became another setting for his financial ventures. His public LinkedIn profile lists London; UK corporate filings record Bulgaria as his country of residence. The geography needs dates and context rather than one sweeping pin on a map.
In an early company profile, he described wanting to create a financial institution from a young age. The aspiration was institutional in scale. Even when he adopted the language of blockchain, the familiar concerns of a financial intermediary remained close at hand: clients, access, custody and the movement of assets.
His listed training reflects that change of subject. In 2018, his LinkedIn profile records a preparation course for EFA certification at Colegio Europeo de Madrid. In 2022, it lists Chainalysis cryptocurrency fundamentals and transaction-monitoring certifications. These are specific entries in his professional record, spanning financial advice and the practical work of examining digital transactions.
The gap between an exchange and an invoice
In March 2021, Mazzuca dated the establishment of Wallex Trust and Wallex Custody to January 2020. He described entering the blockchain industry during the preceding three years. His account of EURST’s origin was unusually direct:
“I came up with the logic of EURST, by noticing the gap in the market for a strong euro stable coin.”
Simone Mazzuca · March 2021
That gap had an everyday dimension. Someone might own digital assets yet struggle to move their value into the account used for ordinary spending. A business could accept a payment and still face the problem of matching it to an invoice in its chosen currency. A market can be accessible on a screen and awkward in an accounts department.
Mazzuca’s proposed place for Wallex was between those systems. He described traditional banks as potential allies and compared the group to a digital Charon, ferrying value between banking and cryptocurrency. Classical mythology is an adventurous choice for a financial pitch. Its usefulness here is the ferry: the value lay in making a crossing possible.
He had a second analogy for custody, likening it to a butler carrying out a client’s instructions. The two images reveal his preferred way of explaining technical services through familiar occupations. Both involve an intermediary entrusted with someone else’s property. Both suggest that competence should be visible in the result.
A euro with an American backing
EURST supplied the currency argument. Mazzuca presented it as a euro stablecoin backed by US dollars, with live auditing part of the design. A euro value on the customer’s side and dollar reserves behind it made a distinctive combination. The currency used to express a payment and the assets supporting the instrument were separate choices.
His intended audience included European merchants, brokers and individuals who wanted to conduct business in a familiar unit. The appeal was practical: a digital instrument could make sense to people accustomed to euro prices. Familiarity, however, does not settle the separate questions about issuance, reserves and access to funds. Those arrangements have to carry the promise.
In February 2022, Mazzuca argued that stablecoins depended on their engineering and issuance mechanisms as well as their currency peg. He welcomed regulatory engagement and treated transparency requirements as a route towards acceptance. That was his stated position. The pitch made rules and financial institutions central to the project’s prospects.
His public discussions also considered central bank digital currencies. He saw room for stablecoins while official projects developed. It was an argument about timing and demand: customers already wanted tools for moving value, while the institutional response was still taking shape.
The supermarket has little patience for theory
By the beginning of 2022, Mazzuca was discussing the prospect of using digital assets for supermarket purchases. A checkout is an exacting place to present a financial revolution. The queue does not become more sympathetic because the payment has an interesting architecture.
His retail plans linked a traditional account identifier and a payment card to access to digital assets. He also announced an ambition for a Wallex Store in Italy, combining blockchain education with a space for fintech projects and equipment such as cold wallets and payment terminals. These were plans he described for 2022; announcing them established the ambition, rather than their completion.
The educational element belongs in his portrait. Selling a financial service may require explaining the vocabulary before a customer can sensibly use it. His proposed store would put that explanation in a physical room, giving a conspicuously digital proposition a front door.
The machinery behind the metaphor
The business also involved technology supplied by other companies. AlphaPoint’s account of working with Wallex describes the use of its white-label technology for a trading platform. That relationship gives the founder’s proposition a more concrete shape: connecting financial services includes buying and integrating infrastructure, as well as describing where money should go.
Mazzuca’s comments in that account returned to daily spending and the appeal of seeing value in euros. The destination was often quite ordinary. A bill to pay. A currency a client recognised. A connection between an existing financial habit and a new system.
Compliance was another recurring part of his public language. In a customer testimonial for Crystal, he described transaction monitoring and identifying potentially risky connections as ways to reduce money-laundering threats. It is a specific expression of his preferred institutional posture. Tools for monitoring a transaction formed part of the explanation alongside tools for making it happen.
Through 2022 and early 2023, his interview appearances continued around stablecoins, banking integration and central bank digital currencies. An eleven-minute January 2023 podcast brought those subjects together again. His LinkedIn articles that February addressed transparency, regulation and EURST’s dollar backing. The repeated themes show where he wanted the conversation to go.
Recognition, then a different set of questions
Wallex Custody received the Cryptocurrency Innovation Award in the 2023 FinTech Breakthrough programme. Mazzuca welcomed the recognition publicly. It was a company award, a dated achievement within the broader business story.
On 29 July 2024, the British Columbia Securities Commission issued a warning about Wallex Global. It stated that the business was neither recognised as an exchange nor registered as a dealer in British Columbia. The jurisdiction matters. The warning concerned that business and its status in that province; it should be read with that precision.
Wallex Global’s exchange recognition and dealer registration status became the subject of a public regulatory warning.
Italian investor complaints supplied another chapter. In January 2026, reporting described Fidea clients seeking the return of funds deposited through Wallex. It also described an email in which Mazzuca anticipated repayments by 31 March 2026. A proposed repayment date records a promise. It does not demonstrate that the money was returned.
In July 2026, the Venice Court of Appeal was reported to have upheld the judicial liquidation of Wllx, described as connected to Mazzuca. That account concerned 66 investors and nearly €3 million. Corporate insolvency proceedings, investor allegations and a finding of personal criminal guilt are separate matters. The reported development belongs to the corporate and investor history.
The names require care, too. Wallex is used across a wider group, while Wallex Global, the UK Wallex Custody Ltd., Lithuania’s Wallexcustody UAB and Wllx are distinct names and entities. The UK company register lists Wallex Custody Ltd. as dissolved. A shared commercial name should never do the work of establishing which institution held which responsibility.
For Mazzuca, the significance is especially direct. His early case for digital finance relied on custody, transparency and connections to established institutions. Those subjects now provide the terms by which the business must be examined. The ability to move value has to include an intelligible account of who holds it, who controls it and how a customer obtains it.
He began with an awkward crossing between financial systems. The crossing remains a useful way to understand his career, provided the person waiting on the other bank stays in view. Money can travel at impressive speed on a screen. Its owner still needs it to arrive.