Crypto At The Corner
With Damien Patureaux, co-founder & CEO of Lyzi.
In 2017, Damien Patureaux and his wife lost almost everything. For five years, they had built a small Parisian empire in the beauty industry, Novaskin, running several high-tech concept stores in the City of Light. Customers flowed in, and the business model ran like clockwork. Their customer acquisition relied almost entirely on deal platforms like KGBdeals and Groupon. People would buy treatments at 90% off, come in, and leave so satisfied that they often spent hundreds of euros on additional treatments and products—a highly effective upselling strategy. But a shift in the market led to the company’s collapse.
The dermatologists' union, relying on a specific French law, targeted all emerging beauty clinics—especially those offering new beauty technologies. Their actions led to the shutdown of beauty offers on discount platforms, a heavy blow for Damien and his wife. Overnight, they had no way to acquire new customers. The shock was brutal. They had to shut down several locations and sell their house to repay their debts.
Damien learned the hard way the importance of not relying on a single acquisition channel you don’t fully control: “We took on more and more risk but underestimated one crucial factor: distribution. We didn’t control it at all. It was entirely in the hands of these platforms. And when they were suddenly forced to shut down, it killed the business.”
It was a difficult time for Damien, who reflects: “You can recognize a real entrepreneur by how many fights they’ve had. I’ve had a few already, so I can tell you—it’s not easy. But it helped us grow a lot. Business requires humility. That’s super important.” That’s also very true. Even when things are going well, you have to remember it’s cyclical. There will always be ups and downs, and you always have to stay focused.
“As an entrepreneur, you look at the blank page and think, wow, there are a lot of opportunities, it’s incredible. But at that time, I think I underestimated what that really meant. The blank page means you have to build the market, you have to evangelize.”
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Unlike many of the entrepreneurs I’ve highlighted in this newsletter, Damien didn’t attend a management school, nor did he work in startups or consulting firms. He started working at a very early age, 15, in the hotel industry, beginning as a dishwasher and waiter, eventually becoming a hotel manager.
He spent time in Greece and the US until he was around 23, before returning to France. That international experience not only made him multilingual but also taught him adaptability, discipline, and a strong work ethic. Even though he quickly realized the industry wasn’t for him, he always valued it for that reason: it’s demanding work.
In 2012, he launched Novaskin, which I mentioned earlier. For six years, he juggled building a new generation of beauty concept stores with his wife while continuing to work in the hotel industry. But while serving as Director of Events at Pullman Hotels, he faced a challenge: how to give visibility to all the hotel’s service points—bars, restaurants—especially during major conventions hosting thousands of guests. That challenge sparked an idea, and soon he created his first venture, Wifit Media, a customer engagement platform built around public Wi-Fi networks.
The company lasted only one year due to market shifts. Tech giant Google decided to move all HTTP traffic to HTTPS, which ultimately killed the business. But Damien had become hooked on tech. There was no going back to the hotel industry.
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Around that time, Damien discovered crypto and blockchain technology. Speculating on crypto didn’t interest him at all: “In 2008, I was living in the US, and at the time, I was dabbling in the stock market. I had all my money invested. When the subprime crisis hit, I lost everything. Since then, I promised myself I’d never again touch anything that goes +10%, +20% overnight.” So he embraced these topics from a very entrepreneurial perspective and quickly saw the potential of what he could build with blockchain.
He considered two options while thinking about his next venture: one was to continue in marketing tech, the path he had already started. The second was to shift into a new industry and explore blockchain based on what he had just learned. It was actually an infographic from BPI France that helped him decide. The map had two sides: one showing marketing tech companies, the other showing blockchain players. The marketing side was so full of logos that you could barely read the names, while the blockchain side was nearly empty. So he decided to launch Fidly: the first major blockchain-based loyalty program that lets you accumulate on one side and spend on the other.
The project was ambitious, but very early. I often talk with founders in this newsletter about how crucial timing is when entering a young market, and maybe it was a bit too soon for Fidly. “I had the blank page syndrome. As an entrepreneur, you look at the blank page and think, wow, there are a lot of opportunities, it’s incredible. But at that time, I think I underestimated what that really meant. The blank page means you have to build the market, you have to evangelize,” Damien explains. Between the early market entry and the impact of Covid-19, everything came to a halt.
Fortunately, Damien met Sébastien Estines around that time. Sébastien was developing Easy Wallet, a crypto wallet based in Montpellier, in the south of France, under the umbrella of Global POS. The company had underestimated the agility required to launch such a project and eventually decided to separate from Easy Wallet. That’s when the two joined forces, and Lyzi was born in June 2022 from the merger of Fidly and Easy Wallet.
It’s funny—I’ve lost count of how many times an entrepreneur has told me a story where something unexpected happened at just the right moment, simply because they kept going. You always have to keep going.
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With Lyzi, Damien has combined the best of both worlds he knows well: physical commerce and tech. Based in Paris, the newly founded company offers solutions to integrate crypto payments into traditional retail environments. It allows users to pay with cryptocurrencies while merchants receive payments in fiat currency.
The company officially launched in June 2023 after a year of platform testing. Built on the Tezos blockchain, Lyzi prioritized scalability, low transaction costs, and regulatory compliance from the start. Tezos’ strong corporate ecosystem in Europe also played a key role in securing partnerships with major retailers. Today, Lyzi works with well-known brands such as Printemps, Fitness Park, or ST Dupont to enable crypto payments in their systems. The company has made impressive progress. When it launched, it received just five requests per month . Today, it handles around 20 per day.
The early days were far from easy. Limited corporate adoption, lack of visibility, and uncertainty around concrete use cases made it difficult to gain traction. That began to change in 2022, when more brands and corporations started building Web3 innovation teams and exploring real applications. This shift marked a turning point for Lyzi, which started gaining momentum about a year ago.
There’s no doubt that crypto is playing a growing role in the global financial ecosystem. In 2024, around 562 million people own crypto—about 6.8% of the global population. But the challenge now is all about usage and volume. Both for the broader development of crypto and for Lyzi specifically. That’s the reality for most infrastructure fintech companies. Signing new customers and offering new payment options is great. But if those options aren’t used, there are no transactions and no revenue.
To increase transaction volume, Lyzi plans to expand across Europe. For now, it’s mainly active in French-speaking European countries but has broader ambitions across the continent. The company is also eyeing the MENA region, where crypto adoption is high. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, 25% of the population owns some form of crypto—the highest rate globally. To support this growth strategy, Lyzi just raised €1.3 million from angel investors and is in active discussions for a larger second round.
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Thomas