Jess Houlgrave on Why Reown Is Reshaping Crypto Payments From the Ground Up

Crypto and blockchain is going to become like that for the internet. It will be something that we all use every single day. We might not think about it as crypto, and we might not even know that it's blockchain under the hood, but it will be how we manage our money, how we move assets around. It will probably be how we think about our identity and how we share data with different people.

It's really nice to be with you. Thank you very much for having me. When we think about user experience, I often talk both internally and externally about this chasm that we have. That chasm is between what users expect, what they're used to in web 2, and what we can deliver to them in web 3. In reality, in web 2 today, we actually have amazing user experience across most aspects of our lives. Billions and billions of dollars have been spent understanding user behavior, optimizing how many clicks we do when we log into an application, making it so that I literally just need to tap my phone and automatically a payment takes place. I don't even need to think about it. I even actually the other day got a ring which has NFC payments in it. So I don't even need my phone anymore. I can touch my ring to the contactless card reader. A payment is made. It shows up really seamlessly in my Neo banking app to tell me what it is that I bought, where I bought it, how much I spent. We are just used to great seamless experiences. We don't have to think about them. And there is a big gap between that and what we see in web 3 today. In web 3, this is a very new technology. It's been around now for 15 years, but in the big scheme of things, that's still very early days. And we haven't invested enough time and resources to make that user experience gap close. We have for too long expected users to download wallets, experience with their seed phrases, store 24 words under their mattress to keep their funds secure. To know what gas is in order to send a payment, they have to know what chain their asset is on. It's no good having USDC on base if the merchant wants USDC on Solana. How is an end user supposed to know these things? And so partly because of just the amount of resources that we've invested, partly because these are actually really complex technological challenges to solve, we have this big chasm today between web 2 user experience and web 3 user experience. Now that chasm is closing rapidly. I think great new wallets for example will do chain abstraction. You don't need to know where your USDC is. We have new ways of working with, and we do this at Rio. We have some options that payments companies can sponsor transactions so that the end user doesn't need to know what gas is, for example. Smart accounts make different kinds of payments like recurring payments possible. But these are all really new innovations. And so I think that we're closing that gap. That's going to drive more demand for crypto payments. But it's still pretty early days and we have a lot of challenges still to solve.

So one of the things that Rion is that we built the first major product that we built as a company is the WalletConnect network. What that allows is seamless and interoperable communications between any wallet and any application. So that was one big user experience challenge that we faced, which was that only certain wallets would work with certain apps. Only certain merchants could accept funds from certain wallets. If you're building a shop, you don't want to say, 'Oh, I only want to accept £10 notes but not £5 notes or I only want to accept Visa cards but not Mastercards.' You want to have that open and you want to be able to accept as many customers as possible. So one of the things that we did at Rion by building the WalletConnect network is enable this very seamless interoperability. It means that you can use any wallet anywhere. And I think that's been a big contribution to the adoption of crypto. Another thing that we've been working on, as I said, is some of these new transaction types. For example, enabling recurring payments. This is very early days. We haven't seen that at scale yet, but we're starting to see interest in that really pick up with some of our customers. So what we have tried to do is really focus on some of these big issues that we know affect user experience and by building better standards and working with all of the wallets on the WalletConnect network. That's about 700 different wallets today and with all of the applications, which is about 60,000 different applications. We can bring all of these ecosystem participants online to create these better user experiences.

When I think about blockchain as a technology, I believe and I have believed for a really long time that one day it will underpin almost all of our interactions. In the same way that 25 years ago we talked about internet companies and some people were building an internet company. Today every single company in the world touches the internet in some way. Whether that's just for their banking, whether that's for their social media, whether that's because they're an e-commerce store, every company thinks about the internet as a core piece of technology that they use to enable their business. And billions of people around the world are connected to the internet. Crypto and blockchain is going to become like that for the internet. So, it will be something that we all use every single day. We might not think about it as crypto and we might not even know that it's blockchain under the hood, but it will be how we manage our money, how we move assets around. It will probably be how we think about our identity and how we share data with different people. It will be how we log in to different applications. It will probably be where our car registration or where our land registration is stored because ultimately what it is is a really efficient and effective piece of technology. If you believe in that world that blockchain is going to be everywhere, what you want is to enable interoperability. You don't want these silos to be built where only certain people can do certain things in certain places. We have silos in the web 2 world because of the way that businesses are built, because of regulation, because we haven't had this ability historically to have these shared ledgers and these shared ecosystems in an effective way. We now have that tooling and so our mission really at WalletConnect and at Rion is to build that connectivity layer. The dream is that anyone with any wallet can use that anywhere on any chain without needing to understand what crypto is beneath the hood. And when we can do that, people will be able to get all the benefits of this technology without the user experience friction that they have today.

There is a constant dilemma I think of building in a walled garden way which allows you to move really fast and building in an open and interoperable way that means everything and everyone can work together. This latter path is much slower. It's often more painful because you have to build consensus. You have to bring everybody along that journey with you. Get people bought in. I think it's the right path in terms of this adoption and in terms of this technology over the long run, which is one of the reasons that as a company we are so focused on standards. Everything that we build is open-source. We bring partners to all of our development cycles so that we have input from wallets. We have inputs from apps in order to build things in a way that really suits the ecosystem at large. We have the WalletConnect council that is made up of experts, technology experts from payments companies, applications, wallets, custodians, the whole ecosystem so that they can also input in the technological direction that we're taking. This means that we maybe move a little bit slower. If we could just decide things and push them out, maybe things would move faster. But I think for the good of the industry, having everybody agree on these shared standards is what ensures that things are actually interoperable. That people can really use their assets wherever they want to be able to use their assets and they can benefit from the core pieces of web 3 around interoperability, choice, control. The sacrifice that we make if we try and go faster and build in a walled garden is that we don't get some of those benefits. Users are constrained to a particular environment. They're unable to move their assets into different wallets or they're unable to interact with the things that they want to be able to interact with. So, it's a choice as a company as to do we optimize for speed but end up sacrificing on the core principles of openness and decentralization or do we try to build using these open standards and I think that the latter is really what's going to pay off for the industry and hopefully for society as a whole. We use it a lot as a company. So internally we build a lot of tooling using AI and every team member is encouraged to use AI every day to make their jobs easier and to make themselves more effective. We also think a lot about AI in terms of how the developer experience works. We've seen an increasing amount of traffic coming from LLMs. People signing up and becoming customers as a result of an LLM, whereas historically they might have used Google search for example. And so we are seeing the developer journey change as a result of AI. And what we've been trying to do is make sure that our tools are really understandable for AI so that people when they're building crypto applications can use the Rion SDKs really easily when they're coding with AI as well. So certainly as a company we think about AI from an external perspective and an internal perspective and then in the broader crypto market I think AI is having an impact. The combination of an AI agent with a crypto wallet is really powerful. Having an agent that I can just instruct to do things, to spend on my behalf, give them control over a wallet so that they can take actions, I think is a really interesting one. And we've got lots of customers who are in that space and who are pairing AI with wallet technology in order to create whole new user experiences that we haven't even seen before.