Cryptocurrency payments have spent years hovering at the edge of mainstream commerce.
Now, momentum is building as infrastructure providers focus less on blockchains and more on making digital currency usable at scale.
WalletConnect Pay CEO Jess Houlgrave said the long road to adoption reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what payments actually require.
“People conflate what settlement is and what a payment is,” she said during a PYMNTS TV interview. “Blockchains are really great for settling value and for moving value, but all of the other pieces of a payment—all of the messaging and the complicated bits—are not really designed for a blockchain ecosystem.”
That gap, described by the CEO as the “messy middle” of payments, includes authorization, capture, refunds and disputes. Houlgrave said those elements explain why crypto payments have struggled to move beyond experimentation.
Stablecoins, Wallets and the Role of Card Networks
Stablecoins have emerged as the most practical crypto asset for payments, especially as wallets increasingly link to traditional card rails.
“A number of crypto wallets have now linked Visa and Mastercard to those wallets, and the transaction volumes have shot through the roof during 2025,” Houlgrave said.
Card-based stablecoin volume reached roughly $500 million in December, growing rapidly month over month, even if still small in the context of global payments, she said. But those transactions still rely on Visa and Mastercard infrastructure.
WalletConnect Pay is designed to move more of the transaction onto crypto rails. Users want choice, like the ability to pay with the wallet and assets they already trust, without worrying about chains, swaps or bridges, she said.
Fragmentation, Stablecoins and Regulation
Crypto fragmentation remains a central challenge.
“Crypto is super fragmented,” Houlgrave said. “You have different blockchains, different wallets, different assets. Even stablecoins alone have been the top topic in crypto, and there are hundreds of different stablecoins and new ones launching every day.”
For merchants, that fragmentation creates operational and regulatory hurdles. WalletConnect Pay keeps choice with the consumer while standardizing areas regulators care about most, she said.
“When we think about information capture, privacy, who has what kind of information and how we share that, of course, that needs to be standardized,” she said.
Abstracting Complexity From Merchants
A core objective is to shield merchants and payments companies from crypto complexity altogether.
“The payments company and the merchant shouldn’t even need to know about any of this stuff,” Houlgrave said. “They should just be able to serve this as an offering.”
WalletConnect positions itself as an orchestration layer, handling compliance, sanctions screening and off-ramping.
“Our job is to remove the complexity,” she said.
The Mechanics of the Ingenico Announcement
That philosophy underpins WalletConnect’s new partnership with Ingenico. The integration enables stablecoin payments directly at physical checkout using Ingenico’s Android payment terminals.
Merchants can accept supported stablecoins without new hardware and without holding digital currencies on their balance sheets.
“What we’re doing with WalletConnect is trying to be that messaging layer that sits alongside the settlement,” Houlgrave said.
The rollout builds on WalletConnect’s existing scale. The network connects more than 700 wallets serving over half a billion crypto users and facilitated more than $400 billion in network volume in 2025, including hundreds of billions in stablecoin transactions.
Ingenico’s global footprint gives WalletConnect access to millions of payment terminals across retail, hospitality, transportation and self-service environments. The partnership allows crypto payments to move beyond eCommerce and into everyday, in-store commerce.
Roadmap Includes Exchange and Refunds
Most merchants do not want to hold stablecoins, a reality that WalletConnect’s roadmap addresses.
WalletConnect manages the conversion between crypto and fiat, enabling refunds that resemble card-based timing.
“You can expect that to be very much in line with how a card refund timing works today,” Houlgrave said, adding that near-instant refunds are on the roadmap.
Adoption will accelerate as banks and neobanks enable customers to hold stablecoins directly, she said.
“Even some very established old banks are really getting their heads around this,” she said.
The goal, she said, is simple: “If people are able to hold stablecoins, we need to give them ways of using that in-store as well as online.”
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