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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Episode 449 | Jess Houlgrave, CEO of WalletConnect
What if paying with crypto felt as effortless as tapping your card? We sit down with Jess Houlgrave, CEO of WalletConnect, to unpack how stablecoins, smarter wallet-to-app messaging, and a new wave of SDKs are collapsing the gap between crypto checkout and the one-click experiences consumers expect.
Jess traces her path from investment banking to early Bitcoin research to leading a network that connects 700 wallets to 70,000 applications and moves hundreds of billions in value. We dig into the real merchant story: slashing fees from the typical 2–3% card rates to basis points, settling in seconds instead of days, and opening doors in markets where stablecoins are already everyday money. The caveat has always been clunky UX - QR codes, chain selection, gas fees - but that’s changing fast as partners like Coinbase Commerce, Mesh, and Privy streamline onboarding and data sharing.
We explore two frontiers set to unlock the next wave of growth. First, in-store payments, where WalletConnect’s new POS SDK aims to meet the speed and reliability of retail environments and is already rolling out with partners in Asia. Second, recurring payments, where crypto’s push model needs safer, revocable permissions to mirror subscriptions without sacrificing user control. Along the way, we zoom out to embedded finance, where neobanks become financial hubs offering custody, trading, and wealth tools, and to data privacy, where wallets enable selective disclosure so users share only what’s needed for shipping, KYC, or age checks.
Enjoy the conversation, and if it sparks ideas, subscribe, share this episode with a colleague, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
SPEAKER_00:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Jess Holgrave, the CEO of Wallet Connect. Jess, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02:Greg, thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you today.
SPEAKER_00:So before we dive into the topics, let's talk about your personal background a little bit, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that.
SPEAKER_02:So I was born in Devon, which is in the southwest of the UK. I think that's probably where I get my love of the sea from. It took me a little while to get back to the sea. Now I live very close to the sea in Lisbon, in Portugal. But in the meantime, spent many years working in London, traveling all over the place, doing a bit of work in the US and in Dubai. And then I've been here for the last couple of years where I escaped the British weather and get a little bit closer to the beach.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Well, can you walk us through your professional journey and how you got to Wallet Connect?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so after school, I studied economics at university. And like many of my peer group at the time, I kind of followed everybody into the city of London, became an investment banker, didn't really know what else to do, to be honest. Neither of my parents had very traditional careers. And so that just seemed to be where the crowd was heading. So I worked for Credit Suisse for some time and then for a Canadian pension fund. And this like love of economics kind of hit me again back in, I guess, 2014, where I started to learn about Bitcoin. One of the things that I'd written about at university was the history of monetary systems. For me, seeing Bitcoin evolve was like watching monetary systems change in real time. So I became very interested in crypto, left the work that I was doing in private equity, and throughout 2015, 2016, was really like investigating crypto and blockchain a lot. I wrote a master's thesis on the applications of blockchain for the art world and built my first startup in the space where we were using this technology to track the provenance of physical assets like high-value artworks to create this immutable record about their history. One of the things I learned there was like there's a timing for everything. We were way too early to start putting this tech into the art world. But I enjoyed it immensely. And after that, I joined a payments company called Checkout.com, which is a European-based acquirer, was chief of staff there, worked across the whole business. But specifically, especially during my latter years, there was very focused on our crypto strategy. And so worked a lot with both our crypto customers, but also thinking about our crypto payments strategy. I left Checkout at the beginning of 2023. And what I was really looking for was something that was like pure play crypto again, and where I could really get involved in building the next generation of financial systems. And I met Wallet Connect through some of their investors and some of their board members. It was already this pretty well-established project within the crypto space. I, as a crypto user, had used their services and products a lot, but also kind of built some things with their products. And so for me, it was a real honor to be able to join the team. And I spend the last two years growing it, evolving it into what it's become today, which is this really global network. We have about 700 different wallets, over 70,000 different applications, and we move about 400 billion dollars a year across that network.
SPEAKER_00:So you've been in this sort of Bitcoin blockchain kind of from the beginning, probably as long as almost anyone.
SPEAKER_02:There's definitely a few people who've been there a lot longer, but I've definitely been there long enough that I've got plenty of gray hairs to attest to seeing those ups and downs. And it's been a real joy to see that space evolve. And I think particularly for me, having worked on the traditional payment side as well as the pure crypto side, there's this really glorious moment right now where these two worlds are really converging. And we're seeing the adoption of stablecoins and of crypto and of blockchain technology really kind of driving forward in the more traditional payment space. So it's a very fun moment in time after all these years to see these two things uh start to work together.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you started to tell us a little bit about Wallet Connect, but maybe tell us more. Who are your customers? Who do you typically sell to? How do you go to market? Maybe a few things like that.
SPEAKER_02:To use a traditional payments analogy, you could think of us a little bit like PLAD or a little bit like ISO 8503 messaging or Swift messaging. What we basically do is provide a set of messaging standards to the industry, which allows them to communicate securely with one another. So on one side of the network, we have all of our wallet partners. Those include wallets that might sit on your mobile phone, like a trust wallet or a MetaMask wallet, hardware crypto wallets like Ledger or Trezor that people might use, all the way through to institutional and custodian offerings, people like BitGo, Fireblock, Crypto.com custody. And on the other side of the network, we have about 70,000 different applications. These could be a crypto-native application like an NFT marketplace. It could be a DeFi trading protocol. It could be prediction markets, which are top of everyone's mind at the moment, like Polymarket. And it can be a more traditional merchant or a payment processor who wants to be able to accept crypto as a payment mechanism. And we basically connect these two sides of the network so they can communicate with each other. So on the wallet side, we have a suite of SDKs that wallets can integrate. And on the app side, we have applications that work directly with some of our SDKs. But we also have a whole range of channel partners effectively through whom applications and payments companies can access the Wallet Connect network. So Coinbase Commerce use Wallet Connect as part of their offering to merchants as part of Coinbase business. We work very closely with Mesh Pay, Mesh Connect, which is another solutions provider for crypto, specifically for the payments industry, Privy, who are owned by Stripe, also are partners for the Wallet Connect network. There's a whole range of ways that applications and payment providers can integrate with the network, either directly with us or with a partner.
SPEAKER_00:What is your business model? Do you charge monthly fees or percentage of transactions? How do you make money?
SPEAKER_02:Very much depends on the specific use case. So interestingly, only about 20% of the connections that go through Wallet Connect actually result in an on-chain transaction, in an on-chain value movement. So for a lot of those payments use cases, we take basis points on the flow. For some of the other use cases, things like verifying a wallet for travel rule compliance purposes, which is a different messaging type, we charge per message, or we can charge more like a SaaS subscription fee. So it really depends who we're working with, if it's a DeFi company or a payments company, and what the different use cases and which pieces of our products are being used.
SPEAKER_00:What's the biggest challenge your company is solving for your customers right now?
SPEAKER_02:You know, I think we have this very broad base, but if I narrow down to the payments use case, which is probably most interesting for your audience, I think in web 2 payments, the traditional payments I'll call them today, we're very spoiled with the user experience. Super seamless. I just take my phone into a store and I tap it and everything is done. Or I, through an e-commerce flow, have a one-click express checkout. It shares my shipping information, everything's kind of done and dusted. If I want to pay with crypto today as an end user, that user experience is much harder. There's scanning of QR codes, multiple buttons to be pressed. I have to understand which chain my asset is on. Does the merchant accept that specific asset on that specific chain? Do I have enough gas fee in my wallet to be able to complete the payment? There's all of these aspects of user experience in crypto that are crypto specific that really compromise the user experience when we compare it to a web 2 payment. So a lot of what we're working on at the moment with the participants in our network is how we upgrade that experience so that in 18 months' time, a crypto payment is as seamless as a web 2 payment. It's a one-click tap or it's a one-click button. The information is exchanged, all of the compliance is handled, all of the messaging is handled really easily. Because we know that consumers want to be able to pay with crypto. If you look at the cards that are linked to crypto wallets today, the volume going through there is small on an absolute basis, but is really rapidly growing. And so there is definitely an appetite for consumers to pay with crypto. And we know also that there's an appetite for merchants to be able to accept crypto payments. Partly because it opens up a new customer base for them. Stripe, for example, who are a Wallet Connect partner, when they opened up crypto payments, they saw some of their merchants really increasing revenue as a result just of being able to accept new customers through crypto payments. But also, crypto payments are much, much cheaper for merchants than using a card payment. They're almost instantly able to be settled. So the funds can go from a crypto wallet via a PSP and out even to a merchant in a matter of seconds rather than days. And so there's a lot of attributes of a crypto payment that are really attractive on both sides of that payment flow. But in order to make that happen and bring it to reality, we've got to improve that user experience. And so that is really central to our roadmap over the next 12 months. We just published a new paper this week outlining the steps that we're taking towards doing that. We've got a large number of our wallet partners who are on board. So I think over the next 12 months, we're going to get that payments experience with crypto much, much closer to what we see in Web 2 today.
SPEAKER_00:One of the themes that I often talk to CEOs and founders of companies about is removing that friction from the transaction. And it sounds like that customer experience that you guys are working on will be huge because right now it's a clunky experience. So solving for that, I think, will be huge. What differentiates you guys from your competitors out there?
SPEAKER_02:So we're very unusual in the sense that we don't really have a direct competitor for what we do. The alternative to using Wallet Connect is really for an application to build bilateral integrations with every wallet. And we know that most application builders don't want to do that. It's very clunky. It also disrupts the user experience because one wallet behaves differently from another when you make these types of integrations. So we're kind of unique in the crypto space in that regard. So we've really come to think of our competitors less of like, okay, who's connecting crypto apps and crypto wallets as to who's moving money around the world and how can we provide a better experience for end users? It doesn't matter whether it's a crypto rail or a traditional payments rail. Really, we're out there to make money movement much, much simpler for consumers. And so I guess if you take that slightly like step back look of who our competitors are, really they're the payments networks. And I think as we see crypto adoption growing, the idea of using crypto for payments is just going to become that much more obvious to many people.
SPEAKER_00:Well, let's talk about the future a little bit. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunity for you in the segment of payments that you're in?
SPEAKER_02:We've seen a number of different implementations. Wallet Connect is used a lot in e-commerce flows, also through payouts flows for ISVs and PayFac type marketplace setups. I think probably one of the most interesting ones that I'm excited about is actually in-store and enabling crypto payments at a point of sale. This is almost like the harder nut to crack in crypto payments than e-commerce. In e-commerce we can already create these relatively intuitive flows between an app and a wallet. But for me to go in-store is a whole different challenge. The speed, the expectation of being able to make an offline payment, all of that stuff is that much more demanding. I think we're really excited. We just launched this point of sale SDK a few weeks ago. It's rolling out with a partner in Singapore. We have new partners coming online in Q1. So I think that's going to be very interesting to see people be able to actually pay for crypto in store. The second like big area of focus and where I think we're going to hopefully unlock a lot of growth is in recurring payments. Today, crypto just as a form factor is really a push payment. There are some standards that allow something that resembles a pull payment, but it looks nothing like pull payments and recurring payments in the traditional world. A lot of work needs to be done actually at the chain technology layer in order to enable safe and secure recurring payments for end users. So actually, over the last few years, we've been working a lot on this approach of how are we going to get to true, safe and secure recurring payments in crypto without an end user needing to give up too much control to a merchant over the assets that they have? That's going to take some time to roll out, but we all know that recurring payments is a huge segment of the payments market today. And I think if we can unlock that with crypto, it's also going to just make crypto a more attractive payment method for merchants and payments companies to start offering.
SPEAKER_00:I'm just curious, do you hear from a lot of small businesses that want to accept crypto? I mean, I don't interview them on a regular basis, but it seems to me like the local dry cleaner, the local pizza shop, are they looking for this solution yet? Or do you think that's a little ways off?
SPEAKER_02:I think it really varies geographically. And that is in two regards. There are some places in the world where more and more consumers are holding crypto, specifically stable coins, often because their local currency has high inflation or for some other reason. So in parts of the world where consumers are holding a lot of stable coins, there's a lot of demand for small businesses to be able to accept those stable coins directly. So Latin America, parts of Africa, parts of Asia, we're really actually seeing small merchants on the ground asking for that. A little bit less so in more developed economies at the moment. But having said that, there are also use cases that are completely at the other end of the spectrum where people, especially for very high-value goods, want to be able to accept crypto payments. So if we're talking about real estate, cars, jewelry, in developed markets, there's often a big demand to be able to accept crypto payments. So it really depends on the type of merchant, who they're serving and where they are, as to what kind of crypto payment they want to be able to accept. Is it about unlocking a new user group, or is it about who your users are on the ground today and the currency that they have? But I also think that it's starting to click in that if people can accept payments, they can really reduce the fees that they're paying on their payments today. Even just in the last week, I've had messages in my Twitter inbox from a bowling alley company saying, hey, we think we can get cheaper payments if we accept crypto. How should we do this? Because if you're a merchant, especially if you have very small margins, if you can take your payments fees down from 2 or 3% that you're going to be paying on a card transaction down to sub-0.1%, and you can get those funds the same day instead of two days later, this is a really interesting prospect for you. As we know in payments, as we introduce new payment forms, these things always take longer than we think. Look at faster payments in the US, how we've had this for 10 years and it's what, less than 1% of payments. So we know that this stuff is slow to change. But I do think this is going to be an attractive form for merchants to do, especially when it gets to the stage where they don't really have to do any work. They can just open it up as a payment method. They're still going to get settled in fiat at the back end. They're still going to have the same reconciliation options available to them, the same integration, but they can just switch on a different payment method. Then I think it's going to become a bit of a no-brainer for a lot of merchants.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. If you can solve for them getting paid cheaper and getting the money faster, then you've really got something there for sure. What does success look like for your company over, say, the next three to five years?
SPEAKER_02:So I think we would love to see those volumes increase. As I said, this year we will process about$400 billion. And we're seeing that growth trend month on month of that look really positive right now. A lot of that still comes from the kind of crypto native applications, but increasingly we're seeing it on the payments and on the stablecoin side. I guess my real dream is two things. One, it's that I can walk into a store and pay with crypto for whatever I'm buying wherever I am. And I think the second thing is that we maybe even move away from this idea of end users needing to think about crypto, businesses needing to think about crypto. I think the real vision is that all of this is there. It's under the hood, it's abstracted, there's no friction. I don't need to learn what crypto is as an end user. I just get a better experience because that's the technology that's powering my payments. And as a merchant, I get cheaper, faster payments as a result of using this. I don't need to think about how it works. It just works for me. And I think that's really the long-term vision is that we can create something that takes so much friction out that nobody really needs to think about it, but they can benefit from it.
SPEAKER_00:I love that vision. So we're talking about one of the biggest trends in the industry, but what are the other trends that you're kind of keeping up with that are really reshaping the landscape?
SPEAKER_02:No, I think that end users are becoming a lot more sophisticated with how they think about their finances. The embedded finance trend is incredibly important. Where am I accessing my financial services? Which companies do I have a relationship with when it comes to my finances? And I think especially I'm based in Europe, but if you look at the breadth of services that many of our like neobank fintechs provide today, they're moving way beyond just a banking setup. They're going to let you hold your crypto and trade your crypto. They're going to be where you do your wealth management activities as well. And so this consolidation of fintechs really becoming like our true financial hub all in one location, I think is a really interesting trend and highlights the need for those fintechs to kind of capture those users really early in order to have that long-term loyalty and continue to offer them great goods and services. Because when you can do that, then you can create your own stablecoin or whatever it is to be able to get the yield on it and you can create these really interesting offerings for consumers. So I think that's one. The other thing that we're acutely kind of tuned into and starting to do a lot more research and building for is thinking about how end users share their data. Data privacy and how we enable opt-in data, how we enable users to control their data, who they're sharing it with, whether that's for a KYC process when you're buying goods and services that have an age restriction or a geography restriction, or you're just sharing data in order for the companies that you interact with to understand you better, I think that landscape is going to be changing very rapidly over the coming years. Consumers care more and more about their privacy and who their data is being shared with. And companies want to know who their customers are in order to be able to serve them better. And so thinking about how we can use the same technology blockchain and how we can enable wallets to have more control over data. Who do I share my shipping address with? Who can see the contents of my wallet from a privacy perspective? I think all of this is also gonna change the relationship that a consumer and a merchant has over time. So I think that's gonna be another interesting one to watch, especially as we have a lot of regulation coming out that's really gonna support that trend as well.
SPEAKER_00:Two final questions. The first one, if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_02:Oh god, I've got probably a long list of things I would tell myself. I think the key thing is to do something that you're really interested in and that you really love. Everybody says it, but I think if you find something that you're really passionate about, you shouldn't worry about like if that's where the money is or are you gonna be successful at it. There's nothing like getting up every day and working on something that you really care about. And I'm so happy that I made that change when I did back in 2015 to really kind of focus on and think about crypto. Everybody thought that I was completely mad at the time for leaving this very secure private equity job and going to work on this technology that nobody had heard about other than the Bitcoin stuff. But having done that for the last 10 years, it's been the most interesting 10 years I could possibly have imagined. So find what interests you rather than what you think you should traditionally be doing.
SPEAKER_00:So, final question: what's one thing that payments leaders that are listening to the show today should really be thinking about in payments right now?
SPEAKER_02:It's gonna sound obvious, but crypto payments.
SPEAKER_00:I had a feeling you would say that.
SPEAKER_02:Spoiler alert, it really is crypto. This change is coming. I think you can deliver a lot of benefits to your merchants, to your partners if you have the right strategy here. Doesn't mean you need to go out and build it and launch it today. But I think starting to invest now is gonna set you up really well for the future because I think the wave is coming, is coming very fast. And of course, get in contact with Wallet Connect, if we can be helpful on that front. Just having an understanding of crypto, maybe getting over some of the skepticism that you have and putting some biases aside and just like learning what the technology really does and how it works, I think is an important thing for every boardroom to be doing.
SPEAKER_00:Jess, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So thank you so much for being on today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
SPEAKER_02:Greg, thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersandpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.