Jess Houlgrave was the very first guest on Payments Pulse when the show launched in December 2025. Six months later, as CEO of WalletConnect, she's back at Money20/20 in Amsterdam to talk about what's changed, from new partnerships and merchants going live on the network, to a keynote where she told the audience that WalletConnect Pay isn't something you bolt on to check a box for an RFP. It just works.
Dayana Aleksandrova sat down with Jess to unpack that idea further.
WalletConnect has been building core infrastructure for the crypto and stablecoin world since 2018, and Jess's view from the CEO seat gives a rare look at how the industry's biggest question has shifted, from "should I do stablecoins" to "what's the best way to do stablecoins."
In this episode, Jess breaks down why 76% of attempted crypto payments get abandoned and what that means for anyone building in the space, how stablecoin usage differs wildly by geography, from luxury goods in developed markets to everyday spending in emerging ones, why non-USD stablecoins are the next wave to watch, and what she's most excited about as WalletConnect heads toward its 10th anniversary.
Full Transcript
Dayana Aleksandrova: Welcome to Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show, where we discuss payments in traditional finance, digital finance, and the convergence of the two. Today with us, we have a very special guest, because she was our first pilot guest. This is our CEO, Jess Houlgrave. We launched Payments Pulse back in December 2025, and she's back with us again. Jess, thank you for being here.
Jess Houlgrave: Thanks.
Dayana: So the first question for you: we launched the podcast back in December, and now it's June, we're in Amsterdam. What has happened at WalletConnect from December 2025 to June 2026?
Jess: Kind of crazy, it feels like a lifetime ago. What has happened in that time? Well, I think we've seen as an industry a lot of change, a lot of forward movement from a regulatory perspective, which is really helpful. Lots of big news items, big acquisitions taking place, lots of traditional financial players making massive moves into the stablecoin and crypto arena.
For us at WalletConnect, we've announced new partnerships, like with Ingenico, we've seen merchants coming live, we've seen new wallets joining the network.
And I think most importantly, one of the things I'm really proud of is we've really innovated on the user experience for crypto payments — solving issues like gas sponsorship, copying and pasting addresses, wrong tokens, wrong chains, all of this stuff which really contributes to whether people are going to be able to actually use this as a payment method going forward. So yeah, lots of action.
Dayana: Making it usable. And speaking of usable, a couple of weeks ago you went to a beautiful restaurant on the beach in Portugal, ordered breakfast, and paid with stablecoins. What was that experience like?
Jess: You know, it's something I've dreamed of for a really long time. I've obviously been in the payments space and the crypto space for ages, and the idea of just being able to take my existing crypto wallet, whatever that is, go somewhere, and be able to use those assets without needing to even have a conversation with somebody, because everything is just managed by the technology, is super refreshing. So it was great — something I hope to see a lot more of.
Dayana: I'm a little jealous I wasn't there, because it truly looked beautiful. Now, you have hundreds of conversations — one internal joke we have is that we have so many meetings, we're tired of winning. But you take meetings with hundreds of companies around the world, with executives. What are the top questions they have for you when it comes to payments and WalletConnect Pay?
Jess: So I think another big shift in the last year has been payments execs not saying "should I do stablecoins," but "what's the best way for me to do stablecoins." We did a report a few weeks ago which showed that 76% of people who had tried to make a crypto payment had abandoned it in the last six months. That's a super, super high drop-off rate.
What that means is, if you're a payments company trying to deliver crypto and stablecoin payments today, you can take one of two approaches. You can say, "I just need it to tick the box so I can answer the RFP, or do a press release, we do stablecoins." Or you can think about it as: how do I actually deliver really long-term value to my merchants?
And the only way you can deliver long-term value is if it gets used as a payment method, and if the share of checkout, i.e. the percentage of transactions going through that payment method, grows, because that's where you're delivering the cheaper and better payment experience.
And if that's what you want to do, you've really got to think about why people are going to use it and how they're going to have a great experience using it, because if someone does it for the first time and abandons it, they're probably not coming back.
Dayana: Yes, and this is something you mentioned yesterday — Jess had a keynote here at Money20/20. You said WalletConnect built technology that people can truly use, and it's not something you put on an RFP to check a box, and then it just works, which it does.
Speaking of the report, we've seen a lot of data coming from the WalletConnect network, and one important point is that people in different countries don't use stablecoins the same way. What can you tell us regarding how people are spending them and where, in different geographies around the world?
Jess: Yeah, so there's huge variation, and because of our network we get to see a lot of this data. Some of the really interesting things: people typically have assets on about 2.8 chains. So they're holding different assets on different chains, which means if they want to go and spend them in different places, you need that kind of compatibility. That fragmentation is really complex to manage.
Different parts of the world are spending very different amounts. One trend we see in developed markets is a lot of appetite in the luxury goods segment — really high transaction values, jewelry, cars, things like that. Also in developed markets, things like gaming are more popular. In emerging markets, it's right at the other end of the spectrum — it's everyday transactions.
People are holding stablecoins as a hedge against their local currency, so they're already holding USD-denominated stablecoins, and they want to pay for coffee, everyday things, rent, etc. So big differences geographically, but demand in both places, just coming from very different causes.
Dayana: Okay, fun idea — I go buy a luxury handbag with WalletConnect Pay, and that's just for demo purposes, I'm joking. Now, when we think about stablecoins, where do you see them evolve in the next one to two years? Give us your best guess, I know nobody can truly tell.
Jess: So I think in the next few years we're actually going to see a whole lot more people holding stablecoins, and they may not even really know it, or certainly won't need to understand what a stablecoin is. What do I mean by that?
I think in your everyday banking application, you'll have your retail account with your bank balance, and you'll also have a stablecoin wallet, and you'll be able to use those stablecoins like you would any other money — pay for things with them, do other stuff.
So I think lots more people are going to be holding stablecoins. I also think we're going to continue to see more stablecoins come online. There are already a lot, but there's good reason why lots of people want their own stablecoin — if you're a bank, for example, I think it makes tons of sense. You can view that as a good or a bad thing.
I think one thing we will definitely see is the growth of non-USD-denominated stablecoins. We've already started to see that come online in Europe, lots more EUR coins, and I think we'll see that in many other currencies too over the next little while. A partner of ours recently announced a Swiss franc and Swedish krona stablecoin.
So we're starting to see more and more come online, and obviously for us at WalletConnect, we can manage all of that fragmentation between them. But I think a lot more stablecoins are to come.
Dayana: And speaking of WalletConnect Pay, who is WalletConnect Pay built for? Who are the people this technology is most useful to?
Jess Houlgrave: So WalletConnect Pay is obviously one of the products that sits on the WalletConnect Network, and at the network level we have all sorts of different use cases. For the payments use case specifically, for WalletConnect Pay, I'd say there are a couple of different audiences.
There are other crypto technology providers who use this because it's a great technological solution for user experience. We also see a lot of payments companies using this — people who want to be able to give crypto payments to their merchants in a really easy way, because it's super simple for them to integrate, it's compliant out of the box, and it looks and feels like an APM to them.
They don't really need to do any additional work, and they certainly don't need to learn anything about crypto, which is really important. And then occasionally we have a merchant come to us directly, because they can't get this through their payments partner, but they really want to accept crypto.
Dayana: That's actually a fun point — on Twitter, I still call it Twitter, every week I get at least three messages like "can I integrate WalletConnect Pay, who do I talk to?" So that definitely checks out. Now, speaking of the vision as our CEO, what would you say you're most excited about in the next one to two years for WalletConnect? Perhaps WalletConnect Pay, or maybe WalletConnect in general?
Jess: So we've been around now since 2018, so two years' time is actually going to take us to our ten-year anniversary, which is kind of crazy. I think our history has been about providing this really core infrastructure to the entire crypto and stablecoin world, and I think we're going to really just continue to do that. It means we continue to partner with the existing, more crypto-native world, but also we're now building a lot more solutions for more traditional financial players as they enter this market.
So if you're a bank launching a wallet, if you're a stock exchange launching tokenized equities, if you're a payments company doing acceptance, if you're doing B2B payments and remittances, for every one of those use cases we've got something in our toolkit that's going to be really helpful, whether that's around compliance, user experience, regulation, or orchestration.
So I think our roadmap is really going to be making sure we've got great products for all of those use cases, and that we can continue to make sure all of the wallets want to be part of the WalletConnect network, because we can deliver real value for their end users. Their users can go, they can pay, they can use DeFi, they can do anything else.
Dayana: So stay tuned. Jess, thank you so much for being a guest on Payments Pulse again.