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to learn more. All right, Jess, thank you so much for joining us. How are you today?
Great. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here.
You are a late addition to this season. a special cherry on top to a couple of these episodes that we are just wrapping up here with the USDG team. They said, "Hey, you got to sit down with Jess and get to know her and get to know her business." So, I've never met anyone from Ron before. Um I was talking to actually recently Will White who I believe was at Wallet Connect. I was talking to him in Mexico City. He's great. Did you work with Will directly at all?
We overlapped for a few months actually. Yeah. Um, so I joined Wallet Connect, which was just Wallet Connect back in the day in September 2023. So I'm just hitting my 2-year anniversary. I overlapped with Will for a couple of months. At the time I was just so wildly excited to be joining the product. I'd used Wallet Connect a lot as an end user. I've been in crypto full-time since 2015 and on the side before then. So, I've had all of these end user challenges in terms of using crypto. And back in 2016 to 2017, I was building an application. So, I had challenges as a builder of how you interact with wallets. When I met Pedro in the summer of 2023, he's the founder of Wallet Connect, and I was so excited by the opportunity to join the company and the project because user experience is so important to crypto. It's been a wild journey since then.
Yeah, there's a lot there. So, let's start with your journey into Wallet Connect at the time. I'm really excited for this conversation to get into the evolution of it as it's now positioned today. It strikes me as post-rebrand, you guys have been really focused on the message you're sending to the world and what type of business you want to be in. So excited to dive into that. But let's start with what you were building and maybe some of those pain points. I saw that you were at Checkout.com before this. What was the journey into Wallet Connect for you? Let's dive in there.
I guess if we go back far enough, at university I studied economics and one of the topics I really dove into was the history of monetary systems. I then joined the traditional finance world in investment banking and private equity. One of my friends got into Bitcoin, and we had endless conversations. For me, it was monetary history in real time. Bitcoin was programmable money. So I started investing in crypto, and by the end of 2015 I quit my traditional finance career. I wrote a master's thesis about blockchain for real world assets, thinking about art, jewelry, and physical assets. In 2020, I joined Checkout.com, a traditional payments company just emerging in crypto. At Checkout, I worked as chief of staff and later on merchant settlement rails. We were the first payment service provider to settle merchants in stable coins, solving time lag and working capital issues. Then I joined Wallet Connect in September 2023, introduced by investors to Pedro. The project had been going since 2018 as an open-source standard for how apps and wallets interact. I could see enormous potential because Wallet Connect provides a single integration to over 700 wallets and custodians. It's a really interesting solution for moving value in crypto.
Yes. So wow, there's so much there. When you think about the original spark, going back to the very beginning, the original spark for you with Bitcoin economics, the fundamentals of peer-to-peer electronic money, which is also how I fell into this space, is like this distraction became so distracting that we needed to find a way to make money here so we could get paid to be distracted. A lot of people found their careers because of that passion. When you look back on that time as a student or early career in this distraction, interest, passion phase, how does it feel now given the seat you have? It wasn't that long ago. What does it feel like now being in the position you're in, looking back at that early interest?
I think the one thing that strikes me is when I first started learning, I felt so late. I was like, 'Oh my god, how have I missed this? I have so much to catch up on.' I spent hours of research and learning. I was in a privileged position when writing my master's thesis because as a student, people were open to chatting. I had amazing experiences messaging people in the space who would take my call. I was drinking from a fire hose trying to keep up. 10 years later, I look back and realize I wasn't actually very late. I caught up quickly. Now it's almost impossible to stay on top of everything because the space has become so broad. On the app side of the Wallet Connect network today, we have over 70,000 applications. Looking back at 2015, the idea that there were that many applications interacting with crypto seems wild. It's funny to think about my mindset back then, thinking I was late, to now being in this incredible position where every day I talk to huge institutions, e-commerce companies, custodians, banks, DeFi builders, wallets. The scale we've reached in a short period is exciting. I'm a deep believer that crypto and blockchain will touch every aspect of our lives. We're still at the very early part of that journey.
Checkout.com, was this the first official kind of crypto-focused role that you had? Did you come in there specifically with a mandate for crypto-focused work? Checkout did a lot of stuff back in that era. In the world of very scaled traditional e-commerce meets blockchains, what was that like?
Well, so before Checkout, I was working on a project called Codex. The idea was about recording the provenance of physical assets on the blockchain. We worked with auction houses, artists, and others. Huge amount of forgery in real world assets comes from documentation, not the assets themselves. Codex was an attestation methodology for industry professionals to verify authenticity. I worked on that for a couple of years, but we were too early. Then I joined Checkout in a generalist role as chief of staff. We were already processing payments for crypto exchanges via credit/debit cards for on-ramping. In 2022, we launched the first merchant settlement rails on crypto, settling merchants in stable coins. That solved time lag and working capital issues. Later, I became fully dedicated to crypto.
Would love your opinion and we can dive into Rio just here in a minute but given Checkout's role there and the merchant settlement system, the involvement with stable coins. Would love your perspective on the evolution of how stable coins are thought of and used in the practical world today. I'd love a five-year history from your vantage point working with those merchants, card networks, banking partners, the stack in that space.
I think probably the biggest difference is that people have gone from thinking of stable coins as a subset of crypto to thinking of stable coins as a subset of money. We've transformed this idea. Stable coins originated as a way for crypto traders to move in and out of a stable asset without tax consequences. Now, in 2025, stable coins are viewed as money. With regulatory tailwinds like the Genius Act, jurisdictions are taking this seriously. I sat on the advisory committee for the Bank of England around CBDCs. We were talking about how to represent real money on chain. The biggest difference is it's not even crypto anymore; these are assets that represent real money. Stable coins can be used for payments and so much more. The growth of the stable coin market, maybe 100% year-over-year, means other players not interested in crypto are now interested in stable coins. If I'm a payments company or asset manager, I need to interact with the fiat and digital world. Stable coins represent that bridge. It's a big mindset shift. It's not just a little part of crypto, but infrastructure for money. I've been blown away building this company for almost a year now with how dynamic and nuanced it all is.
The Forge is really focused on merchant settlement payments use case, doing some innovative stuff. Wallet Connect, from my vantage point, is one of the most OG infrastructure companies that helped stitch everything together. Give us a brief history of the gravity of what Wallet Connect is in the space, when you entered the scene, and what looks like a fresh perspective or brand into the firm and where you see the opportunity and where you want to take it.
One of the most magical things about Wallet Connect is how organically it grew. When I joined two years ago, we had almost no business development or marketing. It grew as a product developers loved because why spend time on 500 wallet integrations when you can do one seamless integration with Wallet Connect? For wallets, why build relationships with thousands of apps when you can enable wallet kit SDK? It's a perfectly positioned network connecting two sides of the ecosystem that wanted to interact. Wallets were separate; you'd have to move assets between wallets to use apps. Now, years later, we have an ecosystem of hundreds of wallets, which is good for consumers. I use multiple wallets for different purposes. As an end user, I want interoperability without moving things between wallets. That interoperability is at the core of Wallet Connect. When I joined, the organic growth meant we didn't necessarily know who all the users were. We've brought in great talent to listen to our customers on both sides of the network and build accordingly. We've brought more custodians into the network because their users want to do things like vote, stake, interact with DeFi. For custodians, using Wallet Connect is better than building 25 integrations. Similarly, our apps have grown from predominantly crypto-native to include payments companies and Web2 companies, driven by stable coin growth. If a merchant wants to accept crypto, they don't want to accept only from MetaMask users; they need Wallet Connect to accept from any wallet. That strategic movement led to the shift to Reown. We decentralized the Wallet Connect network by bringing on 22 node operators. For app developers, there is now choice: you can use our Reown app kit SDK or other options. The Reown brand focuses on building developer toolkits for applications, with features like embedded wallet swaps, on-ramp, and analytics. But that's just one product on a much broader reaching network that we have today.
So that's how I kind of think about the distinction between wallet connectors and network. All of the wallets that we bring, all of the applications and Reown has this much more specific and opinionated app developer toolkit that if you're building an application, you may want to use to onboard and access your users.
Yeah, it's really interesting. How do you relate with the dynamics of the world, the privies of the world, Mesh specifically? It sounds like you play really nicely with those types of groups. I'd be curious how you specifically think you are similar versus different or the complementary nature of those relationships. This decentralized newer version of the WalletConnect network is really interesting. Sounds like it's extremely inclusive of all parties. Would love to also hear how you attempt to spend your time effectively. I feel like there's so much to both of these businesses in terms of the sheer amount of partners, clients, future integrations you're looking at.
So to touch on the first bit which is about the differences and similarities. I think we have this one product that we build, the Reown AppKit, that is a little bit similar to some of these other partners like Mesh or Dynamic. What we try to do there is think about how do we best serve the end app developer, acknowledging that we have 70,000 different applications on the network. They don't all want the same thing. What an NFT marketplace wants versus what a payment service provider wants versus what a DeFi protocol wants is going to be different. I love the fact that there are so many different SDKs built on the WalletConnect network because if I think about the future growth, we have a Unity version of the SDK for game developers. This space is just going to grow, and I want there to be solutions for all different app developers. There's no way that we as a single company can build something that works for the entire internet. So the idea that there are many different partners who are using the network underneath but productizing it in a different way is really exciting. Regarding prioritization, the first thing is to recognize that we often come across challenges in Web3, but we ask ourselves: Is this a problem within Web3? Are we the people to fix it? Does it touch the self-custodial and custodial wallet world in a way that standards are really important? We've built our product roadmap around standardization. It's harder to get everybody around the table—wallets and apps—and write a standard for travel rule compliance, payments, or message signing capabilities across chains. Once we do it, everybody is locked in, and that improves the end user experience. So in terms of prioritization, I think about: Is this a problem that no one else can solve but we can? If yes, it's the right thing for us to do. If there are ten other people who can solve it, it tends to fall lower down our list.
Do you have any recent examples of problems that got you fired up that you were personally really excited to solve, but you felt like they didn't apply to that or you had to let them go because they weren't in that list?
Probably the best example of something that we've really de-prioritized is chain abstraction. I think this is one of the biggest end user experience issues that people have right now. For instance, I have 10 USDC on Arbitrum and 10 USDC on Solana, but I want to interact with an app that needs 20 USDC on Base. Horrible problem to solve. We built some proofs of concept with a few partners that say you can do aggregated balances and swaps as part of a non-custodial flow. But the reality is you can solve that either as the wallet or as the app in many different ways. You don't necessarily need both sides of the ecosystem to agree on a standard there. So we decided not to overinvest. On the other hand, there is a standard I'm very excited about called Wallet Pay. Here we want to create a seamless payments experience. Irrespective of what wallet I have, I want to go into a store, through an e-commerce flow, connect my wallet, click one button, and select pay. I want to exchange information with that merchant, know who that merchant is, and see that I spent two USDC at Pratt to buy coffee or 150 USDC at Macy's. This kind of information exchange is something only we can do because we have both sides of the network—both the apps and the wallets. So that's an example of a big problem where we are uniquely placed to solve it.
Yeah. So when you think about the standardization, thinking about legacy very large companies like a Visa, for example, who because they've achieved this level of growth and influence, they've been able to also have the responsibility to create these standards and protocols. Would you say that because of the sheer amount of growth, influence, and foundational layer connectivity that Reown and WalletConnect have today, that has given you the ability or responsibility to go and do that? I would guess not many companies can be in a position to even do something like that to begin with.
I feel really lucky in many ways. A lot of the hard work of onboarding all of these wallets and big applications was done before my time. I certainly feel that because we're very uniquely positioned to do this, we should give it a shot. I deeply believe in the future of this technology, and I want us to play an important part. We're really lucky to have great investors both in the WalletConnect token and in us as a company who want us to build and solve these problems. Ultimately, it comes down to what do you want to spend your days doing as a team? There's real potential for WalletConnect in the future of the internet and financial infrastructure. So I want to address some of these big audacious hairy goals because we're uniquely positioned. We introduced a program called Wallet Certified about a year and a half ago where we work with our top wallets to ensure best-in-class integrations and standards. We're also working on programs on the app side to develop best security connectivity. We have a Verify API so wallets can recognize when they're interacting with a malicious or safe domain. Our mission is to make sure everyone can benefit from crypto by creating great accessible user experiences.
