Ep. 150 - $46 Trillion Moved, Under 2% Spent: The Stablecoin Payments Reality Check, with Wallet Connect

Liam Gray (0:05)

Hello, and welcome to The Payments Shed Podcast. I'm live from Fintech Meetup Europe in Lisbon with Jess Houlgrave, CEO of WalletConnect. Welcome to the show, Jess.

Jess Houlgrave (0:14)

Hi, Liam. Thanks for having me.

Liam Gray (0:15)

Thank you for joining us. Could you give the listeners a quick intro of who you are?

Jess Houlgrave (0:20)

So WalletConnect is a bit like Plaid for digital assets. We connect over 700 different wallets, whether those are self-custodial wallets, custodians, banks, neobanks, through to over 100,000 different applications. And the use cases could be trading, payments, logging into an application, and we provide the infrastructure for people to do that.

Liam Gray (0:43)

Label coins are now moving 46 trillion a year, but retail payments are under 2%. What's actually filling the other 98%?

Jess Houlgrave (0:51)

So the biggest proportion of the 98%, certainly what we see on the WalletConnect network, is DeFi and trading. That's obviously where stable coins kind of started from, so that makes sense. Other fast areas of growth include B2B payments. If you're moving really large volumes cross border particularly, this is a really obvious technology for you to be using.

And then I think we're also starting to see a lot of growth in things like real world assets and tokenized equities, one of the massive themes of course for 2026, and we're seeing very fast growth there too.

Liam Gray (1:26)

Do you feel like each of these use cases that you've mentioned will be equally popular, shall I say, or equally dominant, or do you feel like one of those use cases will actually sort of pull ahead in terms of the use of stable coins?

Jess Houlgrave (1:40)

My expectation across those is that tokenized equities and real world assets will probably be the largest proportion of stable coins over time. That kind of matches with if you look at the total volume of real, of equities and bonds and things today, there's trillions and trillions of dollars ready to come on chain in that segment. B2B payments is obviously also large, but I think that will probably be the largest over time.

Liam Gray (2:04)

Okay. And if we sort of look at the other side of it, so we spoke about that 2% that's in the retail space.

What does that look like now?

And how are merchants looking at stable coins in particular?

Jess Houlgrave (2:18)

So I think consumer payments, which make up that 2% today, is a segment that will grow over time. It's in many ways a little bit more challenging than some of the others, because you need to solve a lot of issues around user experience, which are easy to deal with, the friction in some of the other segments. Today, we see a lot of merchants, a lot of payments companies wanting to offer crypto acceptance for their merchants as part of their overall solution.

But the ability to do that is still full of friction for those companies. One of the things that we try to do at WalletConnect is, number one, make it really easy for merchants and for payments companies. And then number two, and perhaps most importantly, solve that user experience challenge so that it's not many, many clicks, oh, you've got the wrong token on the wrong chain and you have to abandon that payment flow.

I think over the next three to five years, a lot of those problems are going to be solved and it will be as easy as tapping your phone with Apple Pay or Google Pay. You'll be able to tap your wallet and make a payment whether that's online or in-store.

Liam Gray (3:24)

Absolutely, and I suppose what's interesting from a consumer's perspective is how you actually make that jump. What needs to happen in order to go from that multiple click journey to something that's as smooth as just an Apple Pay style journey?

Jess Houlgrave (3:38)

So we always start from the principle that the user should be able to use the wallet that they already use.

There's a lot of solutions out there that offer something similar to a tap-to-pay, but you need to set up a whole new application, you need to fund that, move your assets in and out, and ultimately that's not how consumers like to operate. We all have a seamless experience today when it comes to storing funds in our bank account and then just being able to pay by tapping a card that is linked to that account. And that's the experience that we're trying to recreate for digital assets. So what that means though is that we have to partner with all of the wallets to make sure that there is a seamless way and something that's standardised because ultimately no payments company or merchant wants to manage hundreds of different integrations and hundreds of ways of communicating with a wallet. They all want to do that in a very seamless way. So the more we work with our wallet partners, the more also we work with chains and token issuers to establish standards that enable these types of payments to be seamless. The closer I think we'll get to that experience.