Hi, Jess.
Hi, Jess. Hi, Brian.
All right. Excited to chat with you. I mean, I feel have we chatted since we were at dinner at the USV World? I can't remember.
Think that might have been the last time. So, it was a while ago.
That was lovely. I was like, 'Oh, I didn't know you were a part of this family.' That's kind of cool. You guys have been hustling, but let's just give you a chance to land the business. So, what is Wallet Connect in 2026? How are you describing the opportunity you guys are running at?
It's funny. Do you know today is the eight-year anniversary of the first successful Wallet Connect transaction? So what started, I know, crazy, huh?
So what started as this? Yeah, I know. We've all actually been around that long.
You can see it in my snake. Yeah.
So what started as a protocol to allow a single app and a single wallet to securely communicate with each other has grown in those eight years to now a network of over 700 different wallets, 80,000 different applications. $400 billion of value moved across the network across multiple chains last year. And the last couple years, well the last year especially, a big part of our focus has been on the payments space, with the clarity provided by GENIUS and other things. Stablecoin payments are really hitting the news, and people are starting to see them out in the real world. So a lot of the products we've been focused on building in the last 12 months have been to make it easier and better for payments companies, but also to think about how the end-user experience evolves for crypto so that people can actually feel that they can use their assets, they can pay without going through these complex connect, sign something that you don't understand type transactions.
So funny. I have such a clear picture of Pedro in Eth Berlin 2019 running around with his laptop with a bunch of stickers and he was always out either by himself on his laptop or surrounded by a whole bunch of people who were asking questions like, 'What the heck is this thing actually?' and 'How do I go use it?' And yeah, that was damn near... I mean, I guess that was that's... Time flies. All right. So, one of the interesting things I think, and maybe you can correct me if this is a wrong approach or assumption to make, but it seems like everybody in the stablecoin space, the wallet space is saying, 'Oh, we got to go get ourselves on that agent payment, agent, stablecoin market map somewhere.' And your big announcement here, I think most recently, is actually saying, 'Well, we're going to go get stablecoins in checkouts at the point of sale across 32 countries, tens of millions of devices, through an... Inico?' I thought it was Incognito. That would have been so much cooler. Inico. So, is that sort of a representation of a strategic choice here? Are you still seeing the opportunity in agent payments? Like, why the focus there?
Yeah. So on top of this Wallet Connect network that we have, we build a number of different products, let's call them. Some of them are focused and we've been building a lot actually in the agent space. One of the challenges we've seen with it is like you've got to give your agents some private keys, which is a little scary, or you have to create them their own wallet for doing things. And I think with that you're going to end up with these dust wallets where you have 100 agents each with their own assets and 100 different wallets. One thing we built recently is the Wallet Connect CLI. So an agent can use your existing crypto wallet. You can still have a human in the loop, for example, to sign the transaction, but your agent can effectively do the first bit of the process for you. So we're evolving in that space. Personally, I'm yet to see where agentic commerce is going to take off. I think there's some areas that it makes complete sense. I'm not yet a believer that I'm going to go online and ask my agent to buy my spring wardrobe. So I guess our approach there is we're building where we see a very clear use case for a Wallet Connect flow right now, machine-to-machine payments, things like that, but I wouldn't say we're all in on the agent side. One of the big opportunities that came to us last year was this partnership with Enenico. For those of you who don't know, they make these kinds of devices, right? The type that you see in store, you can go and tap your credit card here. There might be a QR here. And so it was really through the partnership with them that we started to iterate a lot on the Wallet Connect Pay experience, which is again just one of the products that we focus on. But probably this year, I would say maybe the most important one for us, and where we're seeing an awful lot of demand.
So how did the partnership come together with Enenico?
You know, I reached out to them a long, long time ago. Before I joined Wallet Connect, I was at Checkout.com, which is the payments company. So I've been thinking about crypto payments, whether that's pay-ins, payouts, marketplaces, settlements, for a really long time now. And to some degree, crypto payments in an e-commerce experience are doable. There are a bunch of different solutions out there. A lot of them still use Wallet Connect under the hood, but they're a little bit easier, let's say, because the way you can capture compliance information. You have real estate on a screen. Someone's probably happy to sit there for a few minutes to wait for a transaction to settle on Ethereum. But you put that in an in-store context and you're like, 'Oh wow, this is really different.' No one wants to stand at the till waiting for one and a half minutes for their coffee. Nobody is going to be able to put in compliance information on a screen that's this size or smaller. So it really challenged us to reimagine what the payments experience should look like. And I think today we've got a really beautiful payments experience. Actually, next week at Wallet Con, if anybody's in ETHCC, you'll see some of the innovation work we've been doing, which I think is bringing us much closer to what a Web 2 user experience looks and feels like today in store, where you can take your phone in, don't need to open the camera, payment done.
