We keep saying crypto needs a killer app. It had one from day one: payments.
Not yield farming. Not JPEGs. Just fast, global, peer-to-peer value transfer. It’s the first thing Satoshi talked about, and the one thing everyone outside crypto still understands. Consumers get it. Merchants get it. And unlike most of crypto, it actually solves a real problem for both.
I’ve seen this firsthand across industries, from shipping speakers at Sonos to selling sneakers at Nike to pressing vinyl for indie records. Money movement is always the bottleneck. The cost, the delay, the opacity. Crypto fixes that. But only if we start treating payments as the core product, not a nice-to-have.
Payments Were the Original Point
Satoshi didn’t write a whitepaper about NFTs. The Bitcoin whitepaper is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Not a store of value. Not a speculative asset. Cash.
But somewhere along the way, we got distracted. The industry got high on yield and hype. We started optimizing for whales and degens, not everyday users. The irony? The most practical use case: payments, got left behind.
Meanwhile, the problem that crypto set out to solve never went away. Moving money is still too slow, too expensive, and too gated. That friction is the real villain.
The Problem Everyone Understands
Ask a non-crypto person to explain DeFi or smart accounts, and you’ll get a blank stare. Ask them if it’s annoying to send an international wire or wait three days for a bank transfer? They’ll rant for ten minutes.
Payments are the shared pain point. The most obvious fix. And the clearest value prop.
- Consumers want speed, lower fees, and control.
- Businesses want faster settlement, fewer middlemen, and global reach.
Crypto checks all those boxes. No need to explain "how." Just show them it works.
A View from the Inside
At Nike and Sonos, we built strong DTC and retail businesses. The customer experience was world-class. But even in those environments, payments didn’t feel modern. They worked, but they weren’t fast, flexible, or programmable. There was always friction under the surface.
Running a record label, the pain was even more acute. Cash flow is everything. Without DTC, everyone takes a cut. Artists wait on payouts. Royalties are split across ten contributors. The platforms slow it down and skim it off the top. Crypto rails could make that instant and transparent.
Payments touch every edge of creativity and commerce. And they’re still painfully inefficient.
What’s Missing
So why hasn’t crypto already won payments?
- UX. Still too clunky. No one wants to set up a wallet just to pay.
- Brand trust. Most merchants and PSPs associate crypto with scams, volatility, and meme coins. It’s not just a technical hurdle. It’s a perception problem.
- Tooling. Merchant infra, compliance layers, and accounting integrations are underbuilt or nonexistent.
This isn’t just a tech debt problem. It’s a design and branding challenge. We need infrastructure that works invisibly and a culture that makes it trustworthy. People don’t need to know it’s crypto. They need to know it works.
Bringing global commerce onchain is a massive opportunity, but the hardest path is also the most valuable: a world where merchants and consumers transact directly in stablecoins.
Most see this as a moonshot. But we’re not starting from zero.
WalletConnect already powers the largest network of crypto wallets — over 700 wallets across retail and institutional. This infrastructure was foundational to DeFi. It gave apps access to billions in liquidity and made DeFi connectivity seamless.
Now, payments are the natural evolution.
As stablecoins go mainstream, PSPs and merchants won’t settle for one-off wallet integrations. They’ll need access to the full ecosystem, millions of users, billions in liquidity, all connected through a unified interface.
That’s what WalletConnect delivers. And it’s why we’re uniquely positioned to power the next wave of onchain commerce. WalletConnect is everywhere onchain, time to bring it to your checkout.