Reown CEO Jess Houlgrave: Making Crypto Easy for All! | Paris Blockchain Week 2025

It wasn't founded by me but I am now the CEO.

I'm Jess Houlgrave. I live in Lisbon, which is a city that I love. And I joined the Wallet Connect project back in September of 2023 and I took over as CEO in January of 2024. I have a background in crypto, payments, traditional finance, all sorts of things. But I was so unbelievably excited to join Wallet Connect because I've used it for years. It's a really privileged position because we get to work with all different chains, all different apps, all different wallets, and solve user experience, which personally I think is one of the biggest barriers to crypto adoption — how difficult it is, how dangerous it can be, how uncertain it can be for users. And so the mission at Reown and including the Wallet Connect network is to make crypto usable.

So, Wallet Connect started when we had this first big wallet user experience problem. We had crypto wallets on our phones and everyone was building a desktop application and it was like, 'Okay, how do we make these two things work?' And so Wallet Connect started with a QR code; that's what a lot of people think about when they think of Wallet Connect — connect my wallet to my application. Since then, that network has evolved. We have about 700 different wallets on the network, we have over 60,000 different projects, 15,000 verified domain applications, so it's now a network that covers the whole of Web3. We then have this question of, okay, how do we make this user experience even better? We've solved one problem. For me, there's still a few major challenges out there. Using a new wallet, how do you do that? Using a seed phrase, for example. So, we have a product around embedded wallets. Needing to know what gas is and needing to have gas — I hate this one. So we've built a solution where apps can pay for gas on behalf of their end users. We have a solution for chain abstraction, needing to have USDC on tons of different chains, also a pain point. And so gradually, we're working our way through some of what we think are the biggest user experience challenges in crypto to make it easy and secure for end users irrespective of which wallet they're in. And they could be an everyday person using a mobile wallet, or an institutional investor using Fireblocks or a custodian solution. We want all of them to be able to use Web3 really easily. And so the next six months is going to be a big one. Next week we will do the transferability of the Wallet Connect tokens. The decentralization of the network is really important to us. We have 16 different node operators running the network right now. So that transferability of the token is going to be a big milestone. We have our first wallets that are going to use this new chain abstraction functionality that we've built going live in Q2. And one of the things that I'm really excited about is we're doing a lot more work now with data and AI to give projects more understanding and more visibility of who their customers are, how they should be interacting with them. And so I think you can also expect maybe some data related stuff coming from us later this year.