Stablecoins, wallets, and the future of payments – Insights from WalletConnect’s CTO

Riaz Bordie, CTO at WalletConnect, shares valuable insights into how payments work, especially as crypto adoption grows and the payments landscape evolves. 

Fintech has never been an easy sector to navigate, and payments innovation rarely happens in isolation. In the crypto space, this complexity is amplified by fast-moving technology, evolving regulations, and the need to connect multiple layers of infrastructure – from Web2 rails to Web3 protocols, wallets, and stablecoins. 

To understand how this evolving ecosystem works, we spoke with Riaz Bordie, CTO at WalletConnect, who coordinates the technical development behind WalletConnect Pay, an end-to-end solution that enables businesses to accept crypto and stablecoin payments efficiently.

The journey from Web2 payment rails to wallet-native flows is redefining how payments are made. How do crypto systems leverage existing infrastructure, and what changes when stablecoins become a key part of transaction volume?

The key to the adoption of crypto payments is ensuring that the user experience is already familiar to customers and merchants. WalletConnect Pay is deliberately designed to sit inside existing infrastructure rather than replace it. The system plugs into a payment service provider's (PSP) stack via the point of sale software development kit (SDK), meaning PSPs and acquirers can extend crypto acceptance to merchants without overhauling their operations. The ‘rail‘ beneath a WalletConnect payment is the blockchain itself, but the surrounding layer of compliance, KYC/KYT screening, settlement to fiat, and reconciliation mirrors how PSPs already operate today.

What changes most fundamentally when stablecoins enter at scale is settlement. Unlike crypto assets, stablecoins preserve the price-certainty merchants need while delivering near-instant, low-cost settlements that card rails cannot match. This is why we have seen stablecoin usage surge - according to Bloomberg, overall stablecoin transaction volume has already surpassed USD 33 trillion in 2025. And in 2025, WalletConnect powered USD 296 billion in stablecoin volume, averaging approximately USD 5.7 billion weekly. 

How do PSPs, merchants, and wallets work together to make crypto payments operationally viable and optimal for users?

WalletConnect operates as the connectivity and standards layer that binds these three participants together. WalletConnect Pay, modelled on the role that ISO 8583 or SWIFT messaging plays in traditional payments, is creating a consistent interface so that wallets, merchants, and PSPs all speak the same language without bespoke integrations on every side.

In practice, the flow works like this: 

• A PSP integrates the WalletConnect POS SDK into its existing infrastructure.
• Merchants using that PSP get crypto acceptance without new hardware or direct exposure to digital asset custody. 
• When a customer wants to pay, the POS device generates a WalletConnect QR code carrying the payment intent. 
• The customer's wallet (one of 700+ supported wallets, from MetaMask to Binance Wallet to Trust Wallet) scans the code, handles token and network selection transparently, and the user sees a single approval step. The wallet then builds and broadcasts the transaction. 
• The PSP receives the result, manages any compliance checks, and handles settlement in fiat or crypto according to the merchant's preference.

From a technology perspective, crypto payments often draw on the reliability of traditional payment systems, but what are the main challenges in making them equally dependable and efficient?

The core challenge is that blockchains are excellent at settling value but were not designed around the full lifecycle of a payment. Traditional card networks have decades of infrastructure supporting authorisations, captures, reversals, refunds, disputes, recurring billing, and fraud scoring, which don’t exist natively in a blockchain's base layer.  

Beyond lifecycle completeness, today's self-custody crypto payments still expose users to network and token selection decisions that have no equivalent at a card terminal. There is also no native fraud protection, no authorisation-capture separation, and no compliance-ready checkout layer built into on-chain protocols by default. WalletConnect Pay addresses this by introducing these capabilities in stages: v1 abstracts away token and network friction and unifies the connect-and-pay flow into a single interaction; v2 will add authorisations, recurring billing, loyalty integration, and fraud protection, achieving feature parity with card networks while preserving crypto's advantages in cost and programmability.

 

'The core challenge is that blockchains are excellent at settling value but were not designed around the full lifecycle of a payment.'

 

In 2025 alone, the WalletConnect Network facilitated over USD 400 billion in transactions across millions of users and 700+ wallets. At this scale, how does WalletConnect balance security, privacy, and usability?

WalletConnect keeps communications secure through three core principles. All messages between wallets and apps are end-to-end encrypted, so even WalletConnect's own infrastructure can't read them. Private keys never leave the user's device, meaning WalletConnect can facilitate connections but can never access or move funds. Finally, a built-in anti-phishing layer verifies that apps and domains are legitimate before any interaction takes place, protecting users from malicious actors.

On the usability side, WalletConnect Pay’s design goal in v1 was to collapse the ‘connect → select token/network → checkout‘ sequence into a single wallet interaction, directly addressing the friction that has historically made crypto checkouts feel cumbersome compared to tap-to-pay.

Can you walk us through the architecture behind WalletConnect Pay, from wallet to merchant settlement?

The architecture involves four layers working in sequence.

At the connectivity layer, WalletConnect's network consists of Gateway Nodes (entry points for apps and SDKs), Service Nodes (the distributed, encrypted message storage layer), and the WalletKit SDK, which is embedded in wallets. All communication is end-to-end encrypted over WebSocket connections.

At the payment initiation layer, the POS device, running the WalletConnect POS SDK already embedded in the PSP's stack, generates a QR code carrying a structured payment intent. This encodes what needs to be paid, in what asset, to which address, with any compliance metadata the PSP requires.

At the wallet layer, the customer's wallet scans the QR and then handles all token and network routing transparently (so the user doesn't see these decisions). WalletConnect Pay then runs a balance check and routing check, surfaces a single confirmation screen, and upon approval, builds and broadcasts the signed transaction to the relevant blockchain.

At the settlement layer, the WalletConnect monitors the transaction result on-chain and then performs the settlement in either fiat or crypto according to the agreed arrangement, notifying the PSP. Merchants continue to interact with their PSP in the same way they do for card transactions; the crypto rails are abstracted behind the PSP relationship.

The whole design means that for a merchant, accepting a stablecoin payment feels operationally identical to accepting a card. For a user with a compatible wallet, it's a scan and a tap.

Where do you see crypto payments in 5 years? Do you expect them to coexist with traditional rails or begin to replace parts of them?

WalletConnect's position is a dual-rail future, which allows PSPs to operate card and crypto acceptance in parallel rather than one displacing the other overnight. Our company's go-to-market approach reinforces this - WalletConnect explicitly partners with PSPs and payment processors rather than competing with them, integrating crypto rails into infrastructure that merchants and users already rely on.

However, with global mobile wallet users projected to reach 5.8 billion by 2029 and digital wallet transaction values reaching USD 17 trillion, the addressable base for wallet-native payments will grow substantially.

In five years, the most likely outcome is that crypto payments, especially stablecoin payments, become a standard acceptance option at the PSP level, much like NFC contactless payments were a specialty feature in 2015 and are now the default in most markets. We always have to meet consumers, merchants, and PSPs where they are. 

About Riaz Bordie

 

Riaz Bordie is the Chief Technology Officer at WalletConnect, where he leads the technical vision behind WalletConnect Pay. Bordie is a seasoned fintech engineering leader with deep expertise in scaling global payments infrastructure. He previously served as CTO and SVP of Engineering at Checkout.com, where he spent nearly a decade growing the technology team. He went on to serve as VP of Engineering at SumUp, driving the development of merchant-focused payment products and strengthening the platform's technical foundations for international growth.  

About WalletConnect

WalletConnect: WalletConnect, founded in 2018, is the infrastructure for the financial internet, enabling seamless, encrypted connections between wallets and applications across ecosystems, including Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and TON. WalletConnect is used by traditional enterprises, custodians, institutions, and on-chain applications and wallets, and has powered over USD 400 billion in transaction volume in 2025.

WalletConnect Pay: WalletConnect Pay enables payments providers and merchants to easily and compliantly accept stablecoin and crypto payments, providing low-cost, instant settlement payments with a single integration. Built on the WalletConnect Network, which facilitated over USD 400 billion of transactions in 2025, WalletConnect Pay makes crypto payments available to over 500 million end users via its connectivity with any crypto wallet on any chain. Ingenico is the first major payments leader to integrate WalletConnect Pay.