WalletConnect

Live from Meridian 2026 in Lisbon: @WalletConnect CEO Jess Houlgrave (@Houlgrave) just dropped two announcements on the main stage, and together they say a lot about where on-chain payments are heading. WalletConnect is live on Stellar, and the Government of Bermuda has chosen WalletConnect Pay to power digital asset payments across the island. First, the framing, which was the best part. Remember what moving money between your own bank accounts used to feel like before open banking? Typing in every digit, hoping it landed? Then Plaid showed up and connected thousands of financial institutions to thousands of apps through a single integration, and the whole experience became a tap. WalletConnect is that layer for digital assets: any wallet, any app, any network. One integration and everything can talk to everything and move value. The scale behind that claim, straight off the slide: 900 million end users reached through 700+ wallets and exchanges, over $400 billion in annual transaction volume, trusted by thousands of institutions. If you're building a payment app, a DeFi protocol, or a platform for trading tokenized assets, one integration gets you 700+ wallets. No custom builds, nothing complex to manage. And if you're building a wallet, the same integration hands you every merchant, app, and payment service provider on the network. Jess broke the stack into three jobs. Connect: scan, link your wallet to an app, log in. Pay: in-store, e-commerce checkout, trading, no copying addresses, no thinking about gas tokens, a single tap. Compliant: institutions operate inside local and regional regulatory frameworks and need to use digital assets the way they already know how. That third one is why institutions were in the room. Announcement one: Stellar. WalletConnect grew up in the Ethereum ecosystem and has supported many chains for years. Stellar is the newest, and it's a telling choice. Look at who's building on it right now, the likes of Securitize, Ondo, DTCC, and U.S. Bank, drawn by speed, cost efficiency, and reliability. From today, build an app on Stellar and plug into WalletConnect, and every wallet on the network can interact with it from day one. Build a wallet and add Stellar support, and you reach every Stellar app without a single bilateral integration. With LOBSTR, the most used Stellar wallet, the full connect-and-pay experience is live immediately. Announcement two is the bigger story. Bermuda has been laying groundwork since the Digital Asset Business Act in 2018, started accepting digital dollars for government fees in 2019, and this year declared its ambition to become the world's first fully on-chain national economy, with wages, government fees, and merchant payments moving on-chain via Stellar. The problem it's solving is concrete: merchants on the island pay 3 to 5 percent in card fees, up to 10 percent in some categories. WalletConnect Pay is now the rail for the merchant side of that plan. The first merchant is PTIX, Premier Tickets, Bermuda's leading event ticketing platform. Customers will pay for tickets with digital assets from the wallets they already have. Payments go straight from the customer's wallet to the event organiser's wallet. PTIX never holds customer funds. One platform can sell tickets for many independent organisers. WalletConnect handles everything from compliance to user experience. First payments are targeted for next year. Why tickets? Because it's the right first merchant. Thousands of locals, repeat purchases, a platform the whole island already uses, and a flow simple enough to prove the UX before wages and government fees follow. That's how you onboard a country: one familiar tap at a time. Single integration. Any wallet, any app, any network, now including Stellar, now including a sovereign economy.