Inside the WalletConnect Stablecoin Payments Report with CEO Jess Houlgrave

Friction at checkout

Houlgrave says 76% of people who tried to make a crypto payment abandoned the process "because gas fees, all of this kind of user friction." Even when a user has stablecoins and a merchant wants to accept them, she says, a bad user experience means people don't use the payment method.

She points to UK Open Banking as a warning. It was promised ten years ago as a new payment method and is less than 1% of commerce payments in the UK today. According to Houlgrave, the merchants who succeeded with cheaper payment methods offered user incentives to change behavior.

Cards versus native payments

Houlgrave reads the fast growth of crypto-backed cards as evidence that people want to spend their crypto. She adds that cards solve the problem for the end user but not for the merchant, who still pays high fees. In some markets, she says, paying by card adds an extra five to 8%. Over the long run she expects merchants to hold stablecoins and accept them natively "for a fraction of the cost."

Taking it into stores

WalletConnect started working with Ingenico in about February 2025. Houlgrave says Ingenico has about 40,000,000 terminals, used everywhere from airports to cafes. She describes WalletConnect Pay as "a single scan and click pay," one that hides from the user which stablecoin they hold and which chain it sits on. She adds that baristas should not need to learn what a crypto payment is.

QR codes are the main payment interaction in Southeast Asia, while tap is the norm in the US and EU, so she says tap support will roll out later this year. All Arculus wallets are WalletConnect compatible. She contrasts the open-source WalletConnect network, which any wallet can join at no cost, with proprietary closed-loop systems.