So very excited today to receive the CEO of Reown. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming in the office in Paris. I'm excited as we believe that onchain is the new online and the financial system is being rebuilt on blockchain, but not only every use case, every transactional use case might happen on blockchains in the future. I think what Reown and WalletConnect are doing is making billions of potential users in the future using blockchains and moving onchain. So thanks for coming on the podcast. Can you please introduce yourself as well as how did you fall into the crypto rabbit hole in the first place?
Yeah, so thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here in this really beautiful space. My original background before I got into crypto was in traditional finance and banking, private equity, but I had studied economics at university and in particular got hooked on the history of monetary systems. What that meant was when I first learned about Bitcoin in 2013, I was instantly able to pattern match this evolution of a new monetary system. We had this anti-inflationary digital currency with a limited fixed supply that was like a mirror to some of the monetary systems we'd seen in the past. So that's what got me into crypto in the first place. A couple of years later, I was over traditional finance and moved straight into crypto full-time at the end of 2015. I did a couple of different things. I wrote a master's thesis on the applications of blockchain for the art world, looking at how we could use this technology to track the provenance of valuable assets. Can you still access this series? It is online somewhere? I'll send you the link. I'll tweet it. So I did a mixture of things, and then immediately prior to joining WalletConnect, I was at Checkout.com, a traditional payments company, but where we were providing fiat payments for a lot of crypto companies. If as an end user you went onto an exchange and bought crypto with a debit card, that was the kind of technology we were providing. We built some of the first institutional payments products with crypto. We were the first merchant acquirer to be able to settle our merchants using stablecoin in 2022. So we were starting to build a lot more of the crypto product payment stuff as well as just having crypto companies as customers. In 2023, I got introduced to Pedro Gomez, who is the founder of WalletConnect. As somebody who has tried to build decentralized applications and used WalletConnect infinitely but never really thought about what was going on behind the scenes, when I met him, I was really inspired by what he had already built and also the potential that the network and the customer base held. So I was very excited to join the team back at the end of 2023. It's been a very fun 18 months since then.
You've done a bunch of work since you're in charge. Coming back to your Checkout experience, it seems that the Checkout crypto business seems to be very substantial these days. It seems there's a natural evolution for you moving from offchain to onchain business to completely onchain business, which is what WalletConnect and Reown is today. Can you talk a little bit about this and also how did you get convinced by Pedro? Was the pitch that you were a user, or was it something else that triggered the move?
Even before Checkout, when I was first excited about crypto, I could see the potential that this technology was going to underpin the entire internet. I still really believe that the whole of Web 2 will Web 3-ify in some way. That will be about how we move money and value. I think it will be about how we think about our identity and our data, how we share data with people. Partly because it's a much more efficient technology, partly because it's much more robust and resilient. In a world where our institutions are sometimes not serving people well, I think the right to self-custody is really important. All of these things came together for me with WalletConnect, which ultimately was started to solve the first big user experience challenge: we had mobile wallets and desktop applications, how do we connect them? It's that QR code that solves the problem that most people think of when they think about WalletConnect. The other part that really convinced me was there's no end of user experience challenges to solve. I still think as an industry there is a huge chasm of user experience from Web 2, where we're all very used to downloading an app, onboarding seamlessly, safe, easy, no problem, to Web 3, where we still have very meaningful challenges from a user experience perspective. Loads of different clicks, needing to know what seed phrase I've got, hiding it under my bed, needing to know what native gas token I need to do a transaction, having to think about what chain my asset is on. There's an endless list of things that make using crypto really hard. At Reown and the work we do with WalletConnect, our mission is really about making crypto usable, because that's the only way I think we get this adopted at scale.
You already mentioned it, but is that the long-term vision for the WalletConnect/Reown ecosystem to onboard the next billion users and make this blockchain interaction that is historically quite complex very easy?
It's funny, this phrase that we always use as an industry, 'we're going to onboard the next billion users.' I actually try to challenge us on that because I think the idea of onboarding means we need to teach people, make them come to where we are. I think the reality is we have to take this technology to where they are. That's really how we get this adopted, by meeting people with what their expectations are. At Reown, we also don't build consumer products. We're not consumer-facing. We phrase our mission as building the UX platform for Web 3, because what we're really about is delivering tooling to developers so they can create great experiences. If you're building an app, the last thing you should worry about is how all this wallet connectivity works. You want to focus on building an amazing game or the best staking platform. This should just be something that is available to you and creates a great experience. Similarly, if you're building a wallet, there are all sorts of things you've got to focus on, and that connectivity into applications is probably not where you want to focus your time. By building these toolkits that we can deliver to app developers and wallet developers, I think we can take away some of those user experience challenges and let people focus on what they want to do, which is onboarding the next billion people.
Exactly. So you provide the tools, meet users where they are, so that developers and companies get onboard these usability users. You're saying you're not a consumer-driven company, you're first building for developers that will then access consumers via the app. But you have access to millions of end users that somehow know what WalletConnect is and some now use WalletConnect UX every day. Can you talk about these million users? How many are there? Are we talking how many millions? And also, where are they located? What do you see there?
On the network, we've got about 700 different wallets across different chains and ecosystems. We provide somewhere in the region of 30 million connections a month across five to seven unique 0x addresses each month. Often those addresses are making multiple connections during the month. From a geographic perspective, I have a dashboard with a world map, and I find this really interesting. We see a lot of usage in Southeast Asia, a lot in Nigeria. India is also very big. Latin America is very big. The US is obviously up there as well. Europe is probably one of the quieter places actually. We see this very interesting distribution. My new favorite map that I looked at this week shows the distribution between iOS and Android users on a global basis. That was kind of interesting to see where those are placing.
Can you share the breakdown?
I'll probably tweet this as well, but definitely more Android in Africa, more Android in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Probably what you might expect if you think about the price point of Apple phones versus Android phones. So a very interesting distribution to look at.
Do you feel in Southeast Asia, Latam, and Africa, you mentioned Nigeria, stablecoin is one of the major use cases you see going through the usage and the millions of monthly active users you have?
I think stablecoins have been one of the biggest topics for us over the last 12 months. It's really migrated away from just being a store of value for traders to being something that everyday users want to hold and be able to use, whether that's for payments or because they want access to a currency that is better protected from inflation than their own. I definitely think stablecoins have been a huge topic. Especially in countries with less developed financial infrastructure, stablecoins have really accelerated. That's where we see a lot of activity in Latin America and Africa, because the existing financial system is not serving the people well enough, so they are looking for alternatives. We're definitely seeing a lot of stablecoin growth there, but also in the rest of the world. I think it continues to be one of the hottest topics.
Before we come back to stablecoin and the payment markets, you mentioned 700 wallets in the network. Do you see which wallets have concentration of volume? Do you think we'll have thousands of wallets in the future? Will there be more concentration? How do you see the landscape of wallets evolving?
It's an interesting one because even today, when we look at the top 10 or 20, that list changes very frequently. Who's in the top 10 one week might change the next. So there's definitely a lot of evolution to happen in the wallet space. Today we serve a very wide range of wallets. We have hardware wallets, mobile wallets, and we work with more institutional wallets like Fireblocks and some fully qualified regulated custodian wallets that use the WalletConnect network. It's a really broad range. My expectation is that we'll see some of those areas increase, particularly custodians. We did a survey a few weeks ago. People are much more interested in hardware wallets than they were last year. Last year, about 6% of people said they wanted to use hardware. This year it was like 11%.
Do you think this is because the acts in the ecosystem are growing, and with Bitcoin being the largest, do you feel they believe in hardware even more than before?
I think it's a combination of security and wanting to have that. As users become more sophisticated in crypto, they move from playing around with a small amount of funds on a mobile wallet to thinking they want something more substantial. The hardware wallet experience is also changing and getting better, becoming more intuitive and easy to use than it was before. Overall in the wallet space, when I think about myself, I want to use different wallets for different things. I use my hardware wallet for high-value things, but it's a pain if I want to buy coffee with it. Even as an individual user, most users who have been in crypto for more than a year have five wallets they're using on a reasonably regular basis. That shows there is space for many different wallets. I think it's for wallets to think about what their niche is and who they really want to serve, because not all wallets should look the same. There will be wallets targeting more experienced traders who just want to do swaps, but also users who just want to hold stablecoins and pay for goods and services. What they want from a wallet is going to be different. My expectation is that we'll continue to see a lot of different wallets, maybe even more diversity, with more thoughtful user experiences tailored to end customer needs.
So the fragmentation as the needs on these blockchains continue to evolve will exist with different wallets, different needs, different tech, different user experience. Is it for the WalletConnect and Reown ecosystem to be the key to this wallet fragmentation and UX fragmentation?
If you exist in a multi-wallet, multi-app, multi-chain world, which we do, there are inherent user experience trade-offs. The role we've played historically and that the network will continue to play is to reduce that complexity for builders. If you're building a wallet, you want your user to be able to use every application. You wouldn't have a bank say you can only spend at these shops but not those. That's why we have big open payment networks like Visa and Mastercard that make it easy to use everywhere. Similarly, if you're an app, you don't want to say you only serve MetaMask customers. Why would you reduce your pool of users? With the SDKs we have, as an app you can just serve everyone without needing to think about it or build multiple integrations. You can just say you want to work with every user that has access to the WalletConnect network.
We can testify on that because we have a dashboard where our institutional customers can monitor their stake through different validators and custodians. Definitely part of the easiness of the experience is because we use the WalletConnect SDK and they can connect to their favorite wallet and then stake. Can you come back to the rebranding you went through last year and the separation between the foundation and the company that is building the software so developers can integrate it?
The origin story goes back a long way. When Pedro first built WalletConnect, the server was sitting in his bedroom. Not the case anymore. For a period of time, every message going through the WalletConnect network was encrypted, but still reliant on this very centralized server. A lot of feedback from partners who were completely reliant on us for that connectivity was that they wanted to be able to run an instance of WalletConnect on their own. At the beginning of last year, we started the process. We changed over the database, rearchitected it to support the WalletConnect network so we could decentralize it. We started adding third-party node operators. We have 16 different node operators today. A lot of partners wanted to be able to run their own node. For resilience and future growth, people wanted to know that this core service for Web 3 would be there forever and be very resilient.
If you are a large custodian or a large financial institution, a bank, you might want to run your own infrastructure because you want higher latency, more control on the transactions you pass through the network.
Exactly. We want to give that resilience and strength and choice to people. Last year was a journey of taking the WalletConnect network, decentralizing it from a technological perspective, and also starting to decentralize it from a governance perspective. We created the WalletConnect Foundation, which is stewarding the network, coordinating governance processes and technical upgrades. We decided that should stay as WalletConnect. Despite not being a consumer brand, it has a lot of consumer brand recognition. One analogy I use is the card schemes. As consumers, we aren't direct customers of Visa or Mastercard, but we all know what they mean and have trust in those brands. It's the same for WalletConnect. An end consumer isn't a customer for us, but they know when they click the WalletConnect button that they can securely connect their wallet into an application. The WalletConnect network is now on a path to decentralization and eventually permissionlessness so everybody can run their own node. At the company level, our focus has been on making sure the developer experience is excellent, and that our WalletKit and AppKit SDKs are resilient, secure, and working very well. We decided to separate those two brands. The inspiration came from the idea that we want to take back the ownership of the internet from the big giants and put it back in the hands of every individual. We created Reown as a UX development company so we can work more on a B2B level. We have these two components that work very symbiotically: the WalletConnect network and Reown on the company side.
That's a great mission to give back the ownership of the internet to the people. The WalletKit is for a wallet to be part of the 700 wallets in the network, and the AppKit is for any app to list these 700 wallets so users already on a wallet can interact with the app.
Exactly. That's the core functionality of each SDK. We also have a bunch of other features. In both, we have security features that allow the app to verify their domain so the wallet knows it's interacting with a verified, not malicious domain. In AppKit, we have features like on-ramps, swaps, and email embedded wallets. As an app developer, you can create a very thorough and customizable onboarding flow. Somebody might be bringing their own wallet, but they also might not have a wallet yet. You might want to allow them to create one using a Google login, buy cryptocurrency, or swap into a different token all without leaving your app interface, reducing friction and making it easier for end users.
