The first useful thing to know about WalletConnect is that it is not a wallet. There is no WalletConnect account where your coins sit, no seed phrase to memorize and no house balance sheet taking custody of the money. It is the handshake. When a website displays a geometric blue icon and a QR code, and a phone wallet opens to approve a transaction, WalletConnect is often the quiet interpreter in the middle.
That sounds modest until one counts the languages. Crypto has hundreds of wallets, tens of thousands of applications and a restless collection of blockchains. Each can have different methods for identifying accounts, requesting signatures and reporting whether a transaction worked. Connecting them one by one is the software equivalent of giving every electrical appliance its own wall socket. WalletConnect's original proposition was a universal adapter: an open protocol that establishes an end-to-end encrypted session between a wallet and an app.
By the company's count, the network facilitated 392 million connections in 2025, touched 55.5 million unique users and sat inside roughly 85,500 applications. More than $400 billion of onchain activity moved through it that year. Those numbers do not mean WalletConnect processed or held the money like a bank. They describe traffic coordinated across its network. The distinction matters, but so does the scale.
The useful button nobody owns
Pedro Gomes started WalletConnect in 2018 after exploring Ethereum as a developer and user. The ecosystem's openness impressed him; its wallet experience did not. An application might work with one browser extension but not the mobile wallet holding a user's assets. Gomes saw standards, rather than a proprietary gatekeeper, as the way to preserve choice. The early protocol let a desktop dApp pass an encrypted request to a phone wallet, usually through a scanned QR code. The private key stayed inside the wallet.
The user experience became a piece of crypto muscle memory: choose WalletConnect, select or scan with a wallet, inspect the request, approve. For an ordinary user it means choosing the wallet already trusted instead of moving assets into an app's preferred container. For a developer it replaces a thicket of custom connections with a shared standard. For a wallet maker it opens access to applications without negotiating every integration separately.
“WalletConnect began as a neutral protocol to enable interoperability within the fragmented web3 space.”Pedro Gomes, founder
That neutrality is WalletConnect's main difference from wallet vendors and closed payment processors. MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Binance Wallet, Ledger and Fireblocks serve different users and custody models; WalletConnect can connect all of them. The company wins when competitors at the wallet layer agree that connection itself should be common infrastructure. More wallets attract more apps, more apps attract more users, and more activity gives chains and payment providers a reason to support the same standard.
One request, three distinct jobs
A deliberate split, then a second act
WalletConnect can be confusing because the name has described a protocol, a company, a network and an ecosystem. In 2024, the product company formerly called WalletConnect Inc. rebranded as Reown. Reown continued building AppKit and WalletKit, the application and wallet developer toolkits. The WalletConnect Foundation took stewardship of the network's decentralization, while WalletConnect remained the network identity and later became the name on a payments business led by CEO Jess Houlgrave. Gomes is now listed as founder and director of the foundation.
The organizational untangling follows a technical ambition. WalletConnect migrated from version 1 to version 2 in 2023, added multi-chain sessions and began distributing network operation. Sixteen node operators are visible on its public dashboard. The WalletConnect Token, WCT, was introduced in 2024 for staking, rewards and governance. The goal is a network that does not depend on one relay operator, even while a company builds commercial products on top.
From signing trades to buying lunch
WalletConnect Pay is the clearest expression of the second act. It packages wallet connectivity, transaction submission, compliance data and settlement into an alternative payment method for payment service providers, acquirers and large merchants. A shopper can choose a compatible wallet, pay in a supported stablecoin or crypto asset, and approve from the wallet. The merchant can receive crypto or, through partners, settle in fiat. WalletConnect remains non-custodial during the flow.
The pitch is less “become a crypto company” than “add another button to the payment stack.” Payment providers can white-label the experience and keep their own merchant relationship. WalletConnect says the system can pass sanctions-screening results and Travel Rule information, restrict assets and chains, and produce machine-readable records for reconciliation. It supports online checkout and physical point of sale, with SDK and API paths for wallets. The company also advertises an Agents SDK so software agents can request payments from existing wallets without receiving the private key.
Its customers therefore come in layers. PSPs and acquirers use the infrastructure to distribute crypto acceptance across merchant portfolios. Enterprise merchants use it directly for high-volume or cross-border sales. Wallets gain places where users can spend assets and may earn interchange-like WCT rewards on eligible transactions. End users get a consistent approval flow across wallets and chains. The company says more than 700 wallets are compatible with the broader network.
The customer sees
A familiar wallet, a stated amount and asset, an approval screen, then a confirmation.
The payment team sees
One API, permitted assets, compliance data, reconciliation records and configured settlement.
The business hiding inside the standard
Open standards are excellent for adoption and awkward for invoices. WalletConnect's answer is a layered business model. The network is moving toward usage-linked fees and token incentives shared among infrastructure operators and wallet partners. WalletConnect Pay sells enterprise integration and transaction infrastructure into the existing payments chain. Its commercial documentation describes transparent fees for PSPs, interchange-like revenue for wallets and cashback for users on eligible purchases.
That is a change from the SaaS path discussed around its 2022 Series A. WalletConnect raised $1.25 million in seed funding led by 1kx, then $11 million in March 2022 from a round co-led by 1kx and Union Square Ventures. An ecosystem round added $12.5 million that November from strategic participants including Shopify, Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys, Circle Ventures, Polygon and Uniswap Labs Ventures. Total disclosed funding reached $24.75 million. The later round was designed as much to recruit a network as to extend runway.
The competitive set changes depending on the buyer. A developer can use direct wallet integrations or connection libraries. An app can choose onboarding products such as Privy, Dynamic or Web3Auth. A merchant can buy crypto processing from BitPay, Coinbase Commerce or MoonPay. WalletConnect's defense is breadth and posture: it is already a recognizable connection standard, works across custody models and chains, and does not need to persuade users to adopt a new wallet. Its payment product can sit behind a PSP's brand instead of demanding the checkout spotlight.
The hard part begins at the terminal
Network reach does not automatically make a payment method. Stores need predictable quotes, fast confirmation, refunds, customer support, accounting records and compliance controls. Consumers need a reason to choose a wallet over a card that already works. Blockchains still vary in fees, finality and failure modes. Stablecoins reduce price volatility, but regulation and off-ramp availability differ across markets. WalletConnect's broad compatibility can simplify the front door without abolishing everything behind it.
Ingenico is the consequential test. Announced in January 2026, the partnership is intended to make WalletConnect Pay available through a terminal company with more than 40 million devices in over 120 countries. Initial pilots were expected to support stablecoins including USDC, EURC and USDT. Distribution at that scale is not the same as activation at every terminal, but it moves the idea out of a crypto conference demo and into the machinery used by grocers, fuel stations and restaurants.
The company itself works like a product of the internet it imagines. It is fully remote, with people in roughly 30 countries, and says about 60 percent of the team sits in engineering and product. Its operating details are unusually concrete: quarterly OKRs, written Slack norms, a “structured reading, messy discussion” meeting protocol and No Meeting Wednesdays. The published values - purpose, perseverance and pride - are conventional nouns. The protected Wednesday is the detail employees are more likely to remember.
The smartest WalletConnect product is not another wallet. It is permission to keep the one you already chose.
WalletConnect fits between blockchain infrastructure and payment orchestration. Below it are chains, nodes and cryptography. Beside it are wallets and developer platforms. Above it are exchanges, apps, PSPs and merchants that want a predictable interface to all that variation. The company is betting that the financial internet will resemble the internet itself: many competing products, joined by a small number of boring, dependable standards.
That makes invisibility both its achievement and its risk. Most people who have used WalletConnect remember the QR code, not the company. If WalletConnect Pay succeeds, the icon may become even less important as PSPs white-label the flow. The company will know it has arrived when a payment crosses a wallet, a chain and a merchant system, and the customer finds nothing remarkable about it.