WalletConnect: UX, Security & the Future of Crypto Wallets | Interview with CEO Jess Houlgrave

Yes, thank you very much for having me. It's really nice to meet you. So I'm Jess Houlgrave. I'm the CEO at WalletConnect. WalletConnect has been around since 2018. It's a network that allows wallets and apps to communicate and connect with each other. I've been with the project for just over two years now, and yeah, excited to chat more with you.

So one of the things that we're really focused on at WalletConnect is user experience. We think that user experience is still a big barrier to enabling people to use their crypto in ways that they want to use it. So that can be trading DeFi, buying an NFT, making a purchase in store like doing a payment for example. All of these things are still really clunky for the most part to do today, and that can be for a variety of reasons. But at WalletConnect, we really try to focus on this idea of user experience. So what does that mean? It means a big focus on security. One of the biggest reasons that end users say they don't use crypto more is because they're worried about losing their funds, getting scammed, for example. So we have something called the Verify API which helps with that, as well as our certified programs. Another big gap in user experience is still just the number of clicks it takes to do something. It can be really complicated in crypto. And so the work that we do with our wallet partners tries to change that in wallet user experience. And then the final piece is really around the complexity of having multiple chains, multiple assets. Every single day at the moment I hear about a new stablecoin launching, which is great for those companies. A little bit more challenging though for an end user if you have your assets on 10 different chains and you have some in USD1, some in USD2, some in USD3, like how do you use those in an easy way? And so a lot of the work that we do really focuses on these types of friction points because we really believe that end users should be able to self-custody their assets. That's really important. And that they should be able to use those assets freely.

Yeah, so at WalletConnect, our kind of core infrastructure is broadly chain agnostic, which means it can work with any chain out there. What we try to do by partnering with new chains like TON, like Tron, like SUI and others that we've launched in the last 12 months is to make sure that the developer experience they have is really great and that all of the pieces of the stack that sit around WalletConnect are compatible with their chains. This is important for us because we want end users to have a good experience when using WalletConnect, as well as the developers who build on WalletConnect. And so these are really great opportunities for us to partner with those foundations, partner with those chains, make sure the user experience is best-in-class. And TON especially, I think I'm very excited about, has a huge end user community. You know, millions and millions of users and is rapidly growing, and I think it has a great chance of being one of the key core places that people interact with crypto. So it's a really exciting partnership for us.

So I think one of the reasons that we exist is because we believe that there should be multiple different wallets out there. If you think about an end user, even just a single user, they're going to want to use a wallet for different things. So I want one wallet for when I just go to the coffee shop, I can tap and pay really quickly. I want a different wallet with different security settings. For example, when I think about my life savings. And so we have this very broad spectrum of wallets. And I think that the role of the wallet is going to continue to adapt. So we're going to continue to see this diversity in different wallets, people building wallets for specific use cases. And I think the identity of an individual is a really important part of that. Our identity is very deeply embedded with finance. The way that we transact, whether that's online or in store, could be, for example, as simple as proving that I'm over 18 in order to buy something online. But it also could be sharing my data securely with people. And so I think that it's very likely that the technological properties of a wallet and a blockchain are very suited for this kind of secure storage of identity information. We can set permissions to enable me to share data securely with people but also to revoke access to that data. So it seems to me very natural that the wallet will be, or some wallets will be, a place that people store identity information and can therefore use that identity information wherever they can use that wallet.

Privacy is obviously just a huge topic right now. In terms of blockchain, we see great new chains that have privacy at the chain level. Things like Canton, for example, Aztec, many others at the moment are in the process of launching or have launched very recently. And I think that's going to be a really interesting evolution and change for the industry as we start to see these privacy enabled chains. That doesn't though preclude the fact that a lot of the networks that are already out there don't have privacy built in at the chain level, and so the industry needs to think about how these two worlds will start to integrate with one another. I think for mass adoption, whatever you want to call mass adoption, but I think for the onboarding of big financial institutions, for the real adoption of payments and of crypto as a payment method, these privacy elements are going to be very important for us. And so WalletConnect, you know, a lot of the work that we do is at the standards level anyway. We partner with the Ethereum Foundation, with many other foundations out there to develop the best user standards and roll them out across the industry. And privacy of course is an important part of that.