At WalletConnect, we believe that UX is the key to mass adoption. For web3 to be embraced by mainstream users, the experience needs to be fast, easy, and compelling. That’s why we’re focused on expanding our product suite with new APIs that enrich functionality. That’s also why we’ve embarked on a regionalization strategy that expands our infrastructure and speeds up the WalletConnect experience for users around the world.

The catalyst for this was the recent launch of our new backend, driven by the objective to make WalletConnect v2.0 smoother, more reliable, and faster for everyone. Previously, all WalletConnect users would connect to one data center in Europe, which resulted in suboptimal latency for our users outside of the EU.

WalletConnect now operates in data centers in the US and APAC in addition to the EU, expanding our infrastructure from one region to three. We’re happy to report that the impact has been significant! Here are some highlights from our internal benchmark suite, which demonstrate how WalletConnect v2.0 has become faster on the order of seconds for our non-EU users.

Auxiliary apps such as the APIs powering Web3Modal are already hosted at the edge, thus providing the fastest possible experience for dapp developers using the modal.

While some might point out that transactions still take a few minutes to be settled on-chain, we believe that being able to sign them even a few milliseconds faster marks a big step forward in making web3 UX better than web2 UX. Convenience always wins.

What’s next?

Expanding our data center coverage from one region to three required quite a bit of engineering work. Adding a fourth or fifth region will be more straightforward; hence, we may do so as we see fit. We are also confident that our long-term decentralization plans will enable an even faster experience for our users. For updates there, please stay tuned.