WalletConnect Explained: Pedro Gomes on Crypto Wallet Innovation, Decentralization, and More!

Hello. How are you guys doing? I'm good, thanks. Just enjoying the day and looking forward to our interview.

Yeah. So I started in crypto in 2017. I knew about crypto before but I didn't really go deep into it. Even when Ethereum was popping up in 2016 I just thought it was very curious. At the time I was working in fintech, so the idea of personal finance and banking was really interesting to me and that was my day-to-day job building this new fintech neo bank experience, but at the same time I was learning about Ethereum being so innovative and building this brand new experience and I was finding out that fintech even though it was innovative at the time it was still so limited by big banks and traditional finance. So in 2017 I kind of just got tired of that and I said I'm going to go full-on crypto, this is going to be my full-time job. And I started working for this super early Ethereum wallet that was building one of the first mobile wallets. And it was really interesting because I then got to do all the things that I wanted to do that I couldn't do in the bank. But at the same time, there was this major friction for new wallets to join because MetaMask was so dominant. So we really needed to go above and beyond to get adoption on our wallet. And I realized that it was actually a technological problem that was limiting new wallets coming into the space. And I built this universal standard that supports every wallet in existence called Wallet Connect in 2018. And that's where the journey started. Since then, it's been a very long but very fruitful seven years working on this.

I mean it comes with a role change as well, right? You start doing this as just a very quick weekend project trying to solve a problem. We published that on Twitter and everyone just completely out of their mind. They realized this is exactly what we were needing. And even a couple of months after, the Ethereum Foundation reached out and said, 'We're doing one of the first grants.' So they were building out their grants program and we want you to be one of the first ones. So we actually got one of the first Ethereum Foundation grants and that's when I switched from working in just one wallet to working in Wallet Connect full-time. And as you can imagine, in the beginning it's almost like this developer role but it's also a devrel role. So I'm building the code but I'm also talking to developers about how we can do it better and promoting the project. So there was a lot of conference travel, going to a lot of meetups just kind of sharing the vision and then it kind of grew out of proportion because then I had this massive SDK that all of the developers were using. It was having a lot of traffic and the Wallet Connect services or the API so to speak and then it became like this company. In 2021 we switched from an open source project to an actual company that had investors, it had an in-house team building on it. And building out that company, obviously as you can imagine, I wasn't able to code as much. I even remember in 2022 was when I made the full switch of 'Pedro stops coding because you have better things to do'. And building out that company was a massive step and at the same time we were upgrading the network to support more chains and becoming fully multi-chain. And then in 2024 we made the switch of 'okay, if Wallet Connect is to grow as much as we believe it's going to grow, it has to be a decentralized network'. So that's how the evolution of my involvement was, but also how Wallet Connect participated in the ecosystem as a whole. It's nice to see how it came to fruition from a solo idea to people using the SDK, a lot of users of the API. So it's very nice to see.

Yeah, as I mentioned in the beginning, prior to Wallet Connect existing, every application on Ethereum had to integrate each wallet independently. So you can imagine you're already building in a very volatile market where trends change every second, the technology changes every second, and you have to worry about if you want more users, you have to add one wallet one by one. So having this universal standard meant that application developers don't need to worry about what is the new wallet in the space or what's the most popular wallets in Vietnam. You know, they want one solution to work with everything. So it's kind of like the Visa for wallets. You know, when you go to a shop you use your Visa card and they don't ask you which bank you use. So you have this really nice universality of 'I don't care about what wallet you have, it just works everywhere and anywhere'. And this means that anywhere you go, you can actually just select Wallet Connect, pick up your wallet, whether that's a mobile wallet that you want to just connect with a deep link, or is it a mobile wallet connected to a desktop that scans a code, or even a desktop wallet that has a URL that redirects back and forth between the wallet. It's a multiplatform system that allows you to just connect your wallet anywhere. And some people even connected to cars, smart TVs, and other things that you usually don't connect to your wallets.

So Wallet Connect was a three-part story. At the beginning, it was this open source project was a technology solving a problem from 2018 to 2021. And those first three years are just people kind of hacking around a problem and trying to fix it and just collaborating whatever available time they had, whether as individual contributors or other companies contributing to this project. And in 2021 that's when the growth was so massive that it justified having its own company. So Wallet Connect Inc., the company started in 2021 and we were building the number one SDK for Ethereum which then became the number one SDK across multiple chains and that became its own beast that was just building out a lot of momentum, a lot of features, the best developer experience in the market. And then in 2024 when we made the switch to the decentralized network, we can't have the decentralized network and the SDK together. So they had to separate. So the foundation now, which transitioned to be my role, instead of focusing on the SDK I've now transitioned into the director of the Wallet Connect Foundation where I can continue my mission to build the Visa for wallets. And Reown, which is the original Wallet Connect company, became the company that builds the best developer experience with app kits, wallet kits, and also has the developer dashboard. So there's a connection between the two but it's not the same thing anymore. There's still a relationship because for seven years building this technology, the real team is the core developer of the Wallet Connect network. So a lot of the upgrades come out of contributions of their work which they have worked for so many years.

Yeah. And depending how you want to quantify it, on a monthly basis it's around 20 million connections and a lot of these connections are coming from either existing users or new users. So the number of new users is also growing. So now we're 45 million plus but even on a monthly basis we have like five to six million users just coming back and connecting wallets. And the interesting thing about this is that because Wallet Connect is an off-chain infrastructure that just connects everything as an interoperability layer, we are actually able to identify the actual wallet user without the actual wallet address. So even if you are a power user that has a hundred wallet addresses, it still shows as a single wallet user in the Wallet Connect network because you're able to interact with Solana, Ethereum, but you're still the same user.

Well, at each stage there were different challenges. Back in 2021 our challenge was we had this massive growth around DeFi and NFTs. So even just scaling the servers to understand how can we take as much load, you know, if someone was launching a new NFT collection, how can we make sure that at peak times we can handle a million users in one day. That was one of the first challenges. But by 2022 we had nailed down and solved all those problems. Then we started expanding into different regions. For a long time the Wallet Connect network was operated across Europe and the US, which meant that anyone outside of Europe and the US had a little bit more latency. It was a little bit slower connection. So we then started expanding into Asia and South America. So we're now in Asia and we're looking to expand next to South America. This is also in collaboration with node operators. The advantage of having the decentralized network is that we can now deploy the network in more regions. So we're really looking forward to expanding to more continents as well. And as you can imagine, as part of decentralization is also reliability. You don't want a single party to fail. If there is an outage or a blackout like we saw recently in Europe, you don't want a bunch of node operators to go down and Wallet Connect to stop. So this means that we wouldn't have that concern because we have people in the US, Europe, and Asia operating at all times. So Wallet Connect will always be alive.