Welcome everyone. A lot of lights here. Welcome Pedro. And yeah, let's kick it off. Excited to actually like chat payments, giant e-commerce, everything wallets. Pedro, you want to quickly introduce yourself?
Hi. I think this is maybe the second fireside chat we've done together. So, it's really good to reunite. My name is Pedro. I'm the founder of WalletConnect. We created the WalletConnect network, which is the largest interoperability network across all digital wallets. And now we've launched WalletConnect Pay for merchants to accept crypto in their stores.
Yeah. I'm Francesco, leading developer relations at ConsenSys. And yeah, yesterday we launched a giant wallet. Joe presented a bit in our talk before. And I'm excited about everything, you know, wallet evolution. And we have different products for both, let's say, agents and kind of developers and builders. I think we will touch a little bit on what is happening here and in the space. But let's start with something basic, right? So, WalletConnect payment infrastructure. You guys in the past 6 months have been evolving quite well in a very interesting direction. You want to give an insight what is happening and how things are evolving during these times.
We are seeing a big shift in how people are building wallets. Not just wallet developers, but also how wallet users are interacting with wallets. There was a world where there were a thousand applications every day, and another thousand the next month. WalletConnect came as a necessity because as a wallet user to explore Ethereum, you had to engage with multiple applications across the internet, and connectivity was a big problem. But now, there's a consolidation of what I call the wallet actions—the things you can do with a wallet. Wallets like MetaMask are consolidating those features within the wallet itself. Now the question is, what does the user interface with when they connect to the external world with their wallet? The number one pain point we saw was with payment specifically. So, how can I use any wallet across any merchant, online or in store, that interfaces with a completely different system—whether a payment provider in Nigeria, Argentina, or Hong Kong—and use my favorite wallet? That's exactly what our famous QR code has succeeded in doing for DeFi and is now doing for payments.
It's quite impressive. We were chatting before about chain, like how many different types of payments have been around, right? What are the main types of those payments that you see? Obviously, I'm a bit biased towards remittance or peer-to-peer payments. Could also be micro payments, specifically for paying someone for small services. I think agentic commerce with export 2 is also definitely getting traction here. But what are the categories if you need to break out those payment categories, what would be the top three?
It's funny because if you look at the history of WalletConnect, we went from a very general purpose network that did everything. It was like a Swiss Army knife for wallets. And now, we focus exclusively on payments. But at the same time, payment is such a large world. You have payments between two parties, whether it's me just sending Francesco some money. But then, there's a big difference between two parties within the same country and two parties international, where that would be classified as a remittance rather than a peer-to-peer payment. Then, there's payments between consumers and businesses and vice versa. And then, there's obviously a difference if you're paying between two businesses as well. So within the payments world, there's a big category. From what we've seen in the past, crypto payments have had multiple attempts. Most of the time, they onboarded businesses to a completely new platform, which businesses were not very happy with. So we've tried a very different approach: we help existing payment providers accept crypto without having merchants onboard on a completely new platform.
Yeah, I think we definitely want to hear a little bit more about the lesson learned about these web2 experiences into how a web3 company moving into this world of payment merchant and relationship is actually changing and what are the top lesson learned. But I think touching a bit what you said at the beginning, focusing on payment is definitely a big priority also for us. I think the UX experiences are also changing. Every cycle, it's definitely different. We see a strong evolution of meeting the users where they are. So a lot of ways that people are not interacting with extra features, extra platform. And when we started integrated a prediction market directly on extension and mobile, we started to see the behavior was very strong. People actually wanted to have everything in the same super app specific experiences. And also according to that, they were ready to pay a premium for having a de-risked situation because every time you interact with an extra layer, you expose yourself to an extra security concern. So I think the type of user entering this market are changing, right? Consumer behavior is changing, but I think UX is improving. But the question is for you: do you think UX is improving? Is it improved enough? What are the things that you wish to see adopted more? You know, I remember last year we were in a fireside chat where we spoke about account abstraction, right? How we can abstract more the way. And I think obviously in payment things have changed a lot.
Yeah, and account abstraction still plays a big role, but it's a very specific one, right? Because like you said, meet the users where they are. There's different types of users. There's going to be existing applications, let's say Amazon, who's just going to embed a wallet into the Amazon website. So you never even see that you have a wallet; it's just part of the website. But there's also the scenario where Revolut embeds a wallet within the banking experience. So you don't even know there's an actual wallet, but it feels more like a financial experience. So it's less like an embedded wallet and more like a wallet as a service hidden behind a bank. And then there's the dedicated banking experience like what MetaMask is building with MetaMask card and MetaMask USD. That's more of a crypto native experience, but trying to simplify as a super app. WalletConnect always wants to cater to all of these, so it's trying to be as broad as possible. What we want is consolidation and unification across all these experiences. Our main focus is to break the fragmentation and unify. The QR code standard we built has been quite successful, and we're pushing very hard with it.
Yeah, I definitely see through MUSD, the MetaMask stable coin, and MetaMask card, how distribution is important and how merchant relationship is important. But in the same angle, I also see that people are accustomed to specific experiences. And I would love to understand a bit, you know, you've been—I think we discussed the first time this changing narrative and strategy back in, uh, what is it, 6 months ago? What are the main lessons learned that you want to share that you discovered? I really like this payment in and payment out concept. You want to share a little bit more about these lessons?
Yeah, because if you think about the pain points, at the end of the day WalletConnect is primarily a B2B business with a consumer-facing brand. So it's B2B2C. And we end up focusing on what consumers feel most attracted to. So pay-ins: you go to a store and you can just pay with crypto. No crypto cards, just straight crypto transactions at the merchant. That's very attractive and tangible for the usual consumer. But when you talk to businesses, they have the opposite problem. They want to pay out to consumers, whether it's a marketplace that has to pay out to multiple recipients, or a content creation platform where people create content in Philippines, China, South Africa. They can't support every banking platform. So a stablecoin payout is really attractive because it simplifies their logistics. So we saw a lot of demand at the beginning on pay-ins because that's what we focused on. And kind of the fallacy of if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But as we saw the pipeline grow, we actually had way more demand for payouts. And it was interesting to see how WalletConnect, having built this massive wallet network with over 700 wallets, actually had a competitive advantage in that market.
