You don't have to guess what their strategy is, but what is happening and what do we need to know about that?

Yeah.

So so like I think even outside of crypto and stable coins, the European economic area and particularly like the eurozone is has all these questions in mind.

How do we retain sovereignty as Europe? Right.

You see it outside of crypto, even in just like the regular payments space where there's been moves recently to promote payment methods that aren't controlled by U.S. companies.

So card payments, Visa and MasterCard are still the predominant form of commerce here.

But actually, those are U.S. businesses that's driving, you know, profits for companies that sit outside of the European Union.

How are you all thinking about that? And what are you doing to innovate there?

If we talk about stablecoins, what are the incentives for like both merchants and the end user? What do you think?

So for the merchant, stablecoins or crypto provide lower cost payment methods, much, much cheaper than accepting a card.

We can provide same day, same hour settlement.

So you're not waiting T plus one, T plus two, T plus 30 if you're in Brazil to get your funds.

This has a big impact on your working capital and therefore your kind of costs.

Um, it's very global.

So one of the interesting use cases that we've seen for crypto payments is in airports, where there's a lot of international travelers, people arrive, they don't have the local payment method, um, and people with any crypto wallet can then make a payment.

So when choosing service providers, just like yourselves, Wallet Connect, for example, what should merchants need to pay attention to? Since so much development happening practically every day, what are the top things they have to consider when choosing providers?

Those kinds of methods are still great experiences.

I think there's been, I'm going to cheat and answer with two.

The biggest shift this year, and I say this because this is the space that we work in, I think has been stablecoins as core infrastructure.

That ability to move assets, move funds instantaneously for very, very small amounts of money in actually a very compliant and seamless way, I think is incredibly powerful.

And we're seeing payments companies start to recognize that.

not only just recognize it but actually implement it whether that's for cross-border payments b2b supply chain payments money remittance and increasingly things like consumer payments as well the other piece that i'm really excited about is agentic commerce i think that's much earlier nobody knows quite how it's going to play out but i think that everybody everybody can see a future where we have agents acting on behalf of ourselves as consumers or as businesses.

A lot of the infrastructure still needs to be built around that to make it safe and secure.

Every one of them is great for the customer and every one is just one more thing that the merchant has to plug in and reconcile at the end of the month.

Do we need consumers or merchants to opt into the stablecoin experience, or can this be entirely abstracted away? We can go to the banks themselves to coordinate most of the settlement and most of the volume of these consumer transactions.

transactions.Um, so great, really great question.

And I think that the key thing here is, um, to, to recognize that a payment is actually made up of multiple layers.

So it has a settlement layer to it, but it also has a kind of coordination and messaging layer that allows the parties in that chain to say, "Yes, this payment is authorized," or maybe, "No, this may be a fraudulent payment," for example.

So in this use case, blockchain is a brilliant, brilliant settlement layer.

It's incredibly fast and incredibly efficient at moving assets from one place to the other.

Um, and we've seen that, um, you know, uh, the big card schemes are already doing some settlement.

Could you just kinda give us like your high level like, um, what is the, what is the, the longer bull kind of thesis or vision for how you guys scale your merchant relationships, your adoption, and thus your revenue and kind of your broader kind of financials and, you know, kind of tying that back into the underlying equity or, or the token itself? How do we think about understanding WalletConnect from a, a investment perspective? Not financial advice, just kinda trying to un-understand what the big picture is here.

Are you telling me that API requirements aren't necessary for you to be able to integrate into payments?

So we basically offer a holistic backend system and the way that that can be integrated is in multiple different ways.

So we have SDKs that can plug into existing software, APKs that can be put on Android devices.

People can integrate in a headless way or with APIs.

We're working increasingly on soft POS, i.e. these methods of accepting payments.

in store that sit on a mobile phone or an iPad, so you can do that today.

We're really agnostic because we see that this space is going to continue to change very dramatically.

Can you explain?

So in that migration of interacting with accounts, either through your mobile app or, uh, through an IVR or a desktop website, so what is the role of AI in that transition from accounts to wallets?

When we think about the role of the wallet today, um, you know, it's really about enabling a different user experience than maybe our traditional financial systems have offered us.

And I think that that change is gonna continue, partly driven by AI.

The way that we interact with these systems is going to change.

Um, enabling my agent to take actions on my behalf safely and securely is gonna be a drastic shift for users, whether that's around how they think about their investment products that they're accessing or how they think about everyday payments that they are making.

I think the transition to digital assets also opens up new possibilities for what the wallet becomes.

So it no longer just becomes the place and the software that we use to manage our assets, but also perhaps things like managing our identity or managing our data.

Do you believe, maybe, um, Jess, back to you, uh, since you're more consumer-facing, isn't this really scary for the ordinary person in the street that everything goes at the speed of light, and you can't trust on a human anymore who will sit down, have a look at your transaction, maybe block it or recall it if need be, right? What about that speed? Isn't that the opposite of trust?

It's only the beginning, right? What's holding people back and how quickly can it be adopted?

So I think there's a few things that have been a challenge today.

First is user experience where I think a lot of the user experiences around crypto were designed for crypto use cases.

And actually what we need to develop now in order to take that mainstream into payments is user experiences that look and feel like payments.

So I can tap my phone, I can just scan a QR code and the payment is going to happen.

It doesn't feel complex to me.

So number one, user experience.

I mean, would you suggest if someone had the opportunity to be paid in Bitcoin, for example, would you tell them take your pay in

What do you see for

crypto trends? So I think here we have to distinguish between crypto as an asset class that people are investing in and crypto as a technological solution that people are building on.

In terms of the asset class, this is something that's always been relatively volatile.

Last year we saw that in action.

But as a blockchain technology that really underpins that, that's where I think we're seeing real adoption.

And the Genius Act and other legislation brought in by the new administration has really unlocked the doors for corporates to get comfortable with dealing with this as a technology.

And we've seen institutions moving this from like a proof of concept in their innovation team to embedding it in their product.

You know, I use Visa, MasterCard and American Express, right? So how does someone get started on this?