Stablecoin payments have lived online for long enough. This year, they're stepping onto the festival floor.
WalletConnect is excited to announce a new pilot with Rhuna and Ingenico, bringing in-person WalletConnect Pay (WCP) checkout to UNTOLD Festival, one of Europe's largest music festivals. The deployment combines WalletConnect's payment experience, Rhuna's live event commerce infrastructure, and Ingenico's payment acceptance technology to test stablecoin payments in a high-volume, real-world retail environment.
Held annually in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Untold drew more than 470,000 attendees across four days with over 200 artists performing on 8 stages in its most recent edition. This year, the integration will be live in the festival’s VIP area, allowing 6,000 users to pay with WalletConnect Pay integrated in Rhuna. The stablecoins supported for this will be EURC on Ethereum, as well as USDC on Base, Arbitrum, Polygon Optimism and Binance Smart Chain, while crypto tokens supported include ETH, BNB, ARB, POL, and more.
Why this matters & what’s launching
Rhuna, the infrastructure provider and payments partner behind Untold's in-festival commerce, had one goal - to expand the ways attendees can pay for goods. Today, checkout at scale means long lines, friction, and missed sales whenever a customer’s preferred payment method isn't supported.
There were two problems to solve:
1. Bringing stablecoin and crypto payments to a point of sale for in-person payments
Stablecoin and crypto demand from festival-goers who want to pay for food and beverages already exists; what's been missing is a way to accept it at a physical counter.
Until now, Untold had no stablecoin point-of-sale option at all. Attendees holding stablecoins had no way to pay without first converting to cash or card.
Rhuna closes that gap with this pilot.
Rhuna built the integration between WalletConnect Pay and Ingenico's payment platform, connecting both directly into its payment infrastructure. Running on Ingenico's payment acceptance technology, merchants in the VIP lounge can now accept stablecoin and crypto payments through Rhuna using the same checkout environment they use for everyday payments.
2. Making sure the option is seamless enough for use
A payment option only matters if attendees will actually use it under real conditions. In the case of a festival, this means mid-set, in a fast line, phone in one hand and a drink order in the other. So Rhuna alongside other partners designed the experience, removing every point of friction that normally slows stablecoin and crypto payments down:
- Pay with a range of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies across major chains, from any of 700+ supported wallets.Amongst other tokens, attendees can pay with EURC on Ethereum, USDC on Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Binance Smart Chain using their existing wallets.
- Gas is sponsored.No separate gas token to hold, no failed transaction because a fan forgot to top up for fees.
- Assets are instantly smart-routed behind the scenes. The flow is smart-routed, meaning that if a merchant wants to accept USDC on Polygon and a customer wants to pay with EURC on Arbitrum, WalletConnect will do all swaps and bridges behind the scenes, resulting in instant settlements.
- One scan.At the terminal, checkout is smooth.
Where & when it's happening
The pilot will be live in Untold's VIP lounge area from August 6-9, one of the festival's premium zones, serving roughly 6,000 guests across food, beverage, and reserved table service.
Merchants throughout the VIP lounge will check attendees out using Ingenico POS terminals running WalletConnect Pay, fully integrated into Rhuna's checkout stack. This will be the first time stablecoin checkout has been available at a physical terminal anywhere at Untold.
The pilot is powered by Ingenico's payment acceptance technology and Android-based devices, enabling stablecoin and crypto transactions to be tested within a live retail environment without changing merchant operations.
Why Rhuna worked on this integration
Rhuna powers the entire commerce layer behind Untold, from ticketing and access control to every transaction on the festival floor. Expanding how fans can pay is core to that mission. Every unsupported payment method means longer lines, lost sales, and a worse fan experience. By bringing stablecoins and crypto to the physical counter, Rhuna gives merchants a new revenue channel and gives a global, crypto native audience a way to spend the assets they already hold, with no conversion, no friction, and instant settlement. It is another step in Rhuna's roadmap to make live entertainment the proving ground for real-world payment innovation.
"We built Rhuna to remove every barrier between fans and the experiences they came for, and payments are the biggest one left. Festival goers already hold stablecoins and crypto; what they lacked was a way to spend them at the counter. Together with WalletConnect and Ingenico, we made that possible in the environment that stress tests payments harder than anywhere else: a live festival at full capacity. If it works mid-set with 6,000 people in the VIP lounge, it works anywhere. That is the standard we build for."
Sveatoslav Vizitiu, CEO and Co-Founder, Rhuna
Building on the existing WalletConnect x Ingenico partnership
This pilot builds directly on the partnership WalletConnect and Ingenico announced in January 2026, which enabled stablecoin and crypto payments at physical checkouts during Ingenico’s point-of-sale devices. Rhuna is the first to bring that capability into live entertainment. Read the original announcement here.
Untold Festival is one of the first live environments to put that integration to work at scale, testing it amidst fast-moving lines and a broad mix of wallets, with Rhuna operating the deployment end-to-end.
"Innovation in payments is only meaningful when it delivers a seamless experience for merchants and consumers alike. By bringing stablecoin and crypto acceptance to UNTOLD Festival, we're helping test how new forms of payment can operate in a real-world environment and drive the future of commerce."
Arnaud Dubreuil, Head of Innovation, Ingenico
Solving pain points for both merchants and festival attendees
For Rhuna, this stablecoin and crypto solution is about validating checkout under real festival conditions: fast lines, high transaction volume, and a broad mix of attendees and wallets. Despite these circumstances, settlement should be instant, and the process of payment should be simple.
This is one of the first deployments of WalletConnect Pay at this scale in a physical, in-person retail environment - and a strong signal that stablecoin checkout is moving out of the browser tab and onto the festival floor, with Rhuna building the rails.