00:00I want to bring in Wallet Connect CEO Jess Holgrave because over 12 months almost 300 billion dollars in stablecoin
00:06volume moved across the firm's network.
00:08Jess it's really good to speak with you. Within that volume who or what is transacting in and using stablecoins
00:16the most right now.
00:18Thank you for having me. So one of the big trends that we're seeing at the moment is institutional flows.
00:24These have been ongoing for several years now but trends like tokenization of real world assets equities bonds etc are
00:33really accelerating that as is the adoption of DeFi by some traditional financial players.
00:38And then finally and probably one of our fastest growing segments is real payments use cases and here we're talking
00:44consumer pay ins and pay outs.
00:47And that's about one percent of our network today we expect this year to it that to grow a lot.
00:52Who are those people and what are they what are they spending on?
00:56Really varies by geography actually. So what we're seeing in some developed markets is much higher transaction values things like
01:04luxury goods cars watches and and other assets often where card transactions are tapping out or where people are holding
01:13a lot of stablecoin or crypto assets and want to be able to spend them.
01:17At the same time and in more emerging markets we're actually seeing a lot more of the like everyday everyday
01:22use cases.
01:23These are sometimes places where end consumers are holding stablecoins often as a hedge against their local currency inflation and
01:31want to be able to use those assets on a day to day basis to buy coffee to do their
01:36grocery shopping.
01:36So the whole spectrum and a lot of variety using it on a day to day basis would involve merchant
01:44acceptance of stablecoins and that seems to be one of the big barriers to mass adoption.
01:49What type of merchant what kind of merchant would be ideal in being out front in setting an example for
01:56others.
01:58So we're seeing a lot of merchant demand again slightly in line with those segments and those geographies that I
02:04just mentioned other really popular merchant demand use cases are some categories like gaming a lot of demands from merchants
02:13in areas where there's high volumes of international traffic.
02:16So think like European capital city lots of people coming from all over the world with wealth that they want
02:22to spend on things like luxury goods.
02:25Some merchants do it because their end consumers are really pushing for it.
02:29Other merchants it's assigned to the market that they're forward thinking and that they want to attract new customer use
02:34cases.
02:35And for a lot of them I think the big change has been that crypto acceptance is becoming easier than
02:41ever.
02:41They no longer need to learn about crypto. They no longer need to train store staff to think about how
02:47to accept crypto and what a crypto payment is.
02:50Most of them now I think and certainly over the next 18 months will be able to accept crypto payments
02:55via their existing acquirer and their existing payments partners.
02:58So it will feel very easy for them to enable this as an option.
03:02You know I want to I want to think about settlement versus payment because in the past you've said people
03:06conflate settlement and payment.
03:08A lot of previous attempts to make crypto work at least when it comes to point of sale really hasn't
03:14worked.
03:14What is different in this moment?
03:17So we are about to publish tomorrow a report on stable coins and one of the interesting most interesting things
03:23that I found about the report was the number of people who want to pay with crypto.
03:28That's about 96 percent of crypto holders and they want to be able to use it for payments.
03:32But 76 percent of people who've tried to make a payment in the last six months have failed and that
03:38is because the user experience is today really poor in many cases.
03:42There are multiple clicks. People need to hold the native gas token in order to be able to affect the
03:47payment.
03:47Merchants have a limited number of assets that they can accept.
03:50So if you have the wrong thing in your wallet you can't use it.
03:53And all of these things add a lot of friction to the end user.
03:56And so what we're really seeing is those solutions where we make it as easy as possible.
04:01It's a tap or it's a one click button makes that transaction frictionless makes it much more likely that the
04:08user can complete a transaction and therefore much more likely that they do a crypto transaction again.
04:13So this gap between demand for people to pay and how easy it is for people to pay is still
04:20there but it's closing rapidly.
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