We're doing great. Last time we were talking, we were doing the podcast. We've kind of added a couple things. We do this live now twice a week and it's always fun to cover reports like this and there are so many amazing companies like Wallet Connect who are blessing the industry with insights all the time. So we actually a huge reason we wanted to do this show in this format was because of a lot of these research reports. We felt like there were so many of them that hit the market and we felt like don't get a lot of the tender like the TLC and the attention that they deserve and so we wanted to find a space to have the people who make them and bring these insights to market really go a level deeper. So would love to do that and cover kind of the high level of what this report is. But of course before we do that would love maybe an intro to you and wallet connect and also a shout out to go back to that original episode. We really dove into your background and your early story with Bitcoin. I remember your experience studying and you got your masters in what again? What was it? I'm forgetting. It was um
It was really interesting. It was in uh, the like, well it was economics specifically around the history of monetary systems. That was the bit of my brain that got hooked.
There you go. And you have been hooked ever since it seems like. Give us the quick intro and we can dive into the current state of Wallet Connect.
Yeah. So I'm Jess Houlgrave. I'm a CEO at Wallet Connect. I've been now with the company for coming up to three years. I have a background across payments economics a long time ago. More traditional finance, been kind of in and around crypto for more than 10 years now, which probably explains the gray hair. At Wallet Connect, we're basically a network of apps and wallets. We have about 700 different wallets on the network. Those vary from retail consumer wallets like MetaMask or Trust Wallet, all the way through to more institutional offerings like Fireblocks, BitGo. And on the other side of the network, we have about 80,000 applications. An application can be a merchant for payments acceptance, a trading platform, a game, or pretty much anything else. We provide the communications and connectivity layer that allows those participants to interact. Last year, it resulted in about $400 billion of value moving around the network. We get to work with all chains, all different ecosystems, which is one of the real pleasures. Because of this network, we see so much interesting data about what is happening for real, not just what people say is happening. We also have this great community that we use for research and get to partner with so many different people. It's one of the reasons we produce reports like the stable coin and crypto report we did last week, to really try and share that insight and learning. What are we seeing? How do you get granular? How is it different in one country versus another? How do people think about chains or tokens differently in different places? So that's a little bit about us.
Yeah. So, I will say I love just how much of an advocate you are in the space. For one, you have an awesome terminal. Drew and I were talking about that earlier, but you don't see that, right? You see the two sides of the space that are either just use a stable coin card, let the people in emerging markets that want to use do it. And if you're in the US or in the UK, you can go use Revolut or whatever your bank is, just forget it. Your report paints a very different picture. I'm looking at this, 79.2% of wallets hold less than $100. 0.4% of wallets hold 98% of value. That's a massive number. Why a payment terminal? Why the need for this? What are you actually hearing from consumers that are this 80% of the market that have less than $100 in their wallets?
So your first question, why a terminal? I really believe that all value movement is going to move on-chain at some point. It's going to take us a while because there's so much existing infrastructure. I think it's an inevitability. This technology just makes sense. It is so efficient, so quick, so useful from a compliance perspective. People underestimate it and think it's problematic, but as regulators become smarter and we build the right tooling, it gives us way more than we've ever had with existing financial infrastructure. Things like crypto cards solve an immediate problem: people want to spend their crypto, and cards offer an effective way. But cards aren't accepted everywhere, or card fees are really high. I spent a month in Africa last year, and if I tried to pay with a card, I would get charged an extra 5 to 8 percent. That penalizes people. The reason is merchants pay such high fees on card transactions. So while crypto cards solve the problem for the end user of how to spend crypto, they don't solve the problem for the merchant of how to have low-cost effective payments. If you're a local business running on tight margins, 2 to 3% of a transaction going to a card company is a lot. So with Wallet Connect Pay, one of our products, we're saying you can have a payment that takes place fully on-chain. If you want to off-ramp at the end, we can facilitate that. Over the long run, I think we will see merchants holding stable coins, so it makes complete sense to accept those payments natively over stable coin, and we can do it for a fraction of the cost. When we partnered with Inenico, they have about 14 million terminals globally, everywhere from airports to cafes to restaurants. It was an amazing opportunity to work with such an established player to bring real on-chain payments to life. We've also partnered with many others. It's not just terminals – we do e-commerce, pay by link, omni-channel. The idea of me being able to go and pay at a beach restaurant that accepts crypto – I just love it. That's the payment system of tomorrow.
We did see, speaking of the beach example here, we might as well pull up this demo. This was great. So this is you actually showing and walking through the user experience of how this works. So you're using a Safe wallet, scanning a QR code. Are you at this destination right now at the beach? You look sun-kissed. Is this where you currently are? This sounds not far. This is great. I think we need to be contracted to come out and do these videos so we have an excuse to go where you are. I think it'd be cool to do a video where you go to a random city and you have to survive on $100 a day, only going to places that accept stable coins as payments, and you have to hunt every place down. Drew, there we go. There's our next one.
I mean, if we're deployed wherever she was here, I'm in that room though. This is almost like a chicken and the egg conversation. People say merchants don't want to accept stable coins because consumers don't have them, but aren't consumers not paying with stable coins because merchants don't accept them? Which one do you think needs to come first?
Payments is very interesting because there is so much that is chicken and egg about them. Even once you make a payment method available, users might not use it if the user experience is bad. One of the stats in our report is that about 76% of people who have tried to make a crypto payment have abandoned the process because of gas fees and user friction. So many parts of that chain need to be addressed. A couple things give me confidence. Crypto-backed cards are growing fast, which is real evidence that people want to spend their crypto. The card is a familiar form factor. Also, more banks and neo banks are issuing wallets alongside retail accounts. That will be where a lot of people hold their stable coins, and they'll want to use them. They may not even know it's a stable coin under the hood, just like people don't distinguish between digital cash and real cash. We have to make it easy and drive incentives. Why would a user switch? Maybe cash back. Why would a merchant switch? Make it easy and compelling – cheaper, faster settlement. It's definitely chicken and egg, but we're seeing strong momentum.
You know, I've thought a lot about this. We're seeing massive rise with dual pricing. If you pay with a credit card, you pay 4% as the consumer, versus cash. I don't carry cash. But I wonder if presented with the option to pay with stable coins with a quick on-ramp and get 4% less or cash back, what would consumers do? I think of the Starbucks model where you get additional points spending through their platform. This begs the question of what consumers would do. And I think this is my favorite anecdote about new payment methods. I'm from the UK originally. UK open banking was promised to be amazing 10 years ago, but today it's less than 1% of commerce payments. Why? Two things: user experience is a little scary – 'connect your bank account' feels unfamiliar – and there are very little incentives. Merchants who succeeded with open banking offered incentives like 5% off first purchase. You have to create behavioral change. With crypto, the user experience is still poor in many cases. That's why we focused on great UX for Wallet Connect Pay: a single scan and click pay, or tap your phone. Then you need to build in incentives. I wanted to talk about the relationship with Inenico. For those not aware, they are a huge payments company. Frame us up a bit on that relationship. What are you doing with them? Why is it important? I feel this is an example that could replicate many times. In the report, they say the role of payment infrastructure providers like Inenico is to absorb complexity so the consumer gets choice and the merchant gets simplicity. Speak to this.
Inenico is one of the biggest hardware payments companies in the world. They have about 40 million devices globally in shops, restaurants, bars, petrol stations. We started working with them back in February 2025. One thing they are experts in is in-store user experience: how to make it fast, efficient, delightful. It's different from e-commerce because there's no one waiting behind you. You also have less real estate. We worked with them to iterate and get a delightful user experience. We looked at problems like needing gas tokens, speed of transactions, abstracting away that someone might have PYUSD on Solana and someone else EURC on Base. You don't know who will come into your store with what asset. We broke down every step of that payment. Crucially, we don't need to educate the person at the checkout about crypto. If you have to tell a Starbucks barista what crypto payment is, it's not going to happen. So we had a high bar: one click, fast, compliant, easy. The drop-off rate must be low, because it's useless if 70% of people can't complete a payment.
