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Jess Houlgrave, CEO of WalletConnect, said the shift of stablecoin payments from online checkouts to physical retail is creating a new set of requirements for speed, compliance, and customer experience at the point of sale. “You don’t want to be there waiting for 20 seconds just for the payment conversion to go through,” Houlgrave told PYMNTS.
For years, crypto payments have largely played out online, embedded in eCommerce flows and trading platforms. Houlgrave said stablecoins are now moving into physical retail environments, where the same delays that can be tolerated on the web become friction in stores.
In-store transactions must clear in seconds, queues must move quickly, and compliance must be handled without interrupting the customer flow. Houlgrave noted that physical retail is a major share of activity in many markets, saying that in some countries it can be “up to 80%.”
WalletConnect recently announced an April 21 integration with iMin aimed at bringing stablecoin payments to smart POS devices. Houlgrave said the objective is to make crypto payments feel invisible to merchants, drawing a comparison to card networks such as Visa and Mastercard.
“The goal here is that the merchant shouldn’t care if somebody’s paying with crypto,” Houlgrave said.
Houlgrave described a broader FinTech trend toward abstraction—hiding underlying complexity behind familiar payment interfaces. Whether a customer taps a phone, scans a QR code, or uses a hardware wallet, the in-store experience should remain consistent.
“We have to make sure that it’s really easy for the in-store operator,” Houlgrave said. “They don’t need to learn about chains and tokens.”
He also said the approach needs to work across different payment preferences, which vary by market, without forcing customers into a new behavior. Instead, crypto should be embedded into existing checkout methods.
One constraint in physical retail is limited “real estate” for compliance workflows compared with online checkouts, where merchants can collect more customer data. Houlgrave said WalletConnect has focused on moving data capture into the wallet interface to support compliant payment flows without requiring extensive merchant-side data collection.
“We’ve been really focused on moving some of that data capture and data collection into the wallet interface … [so] we can continue to make compliant payment flows even though you don’t have all of this real estate,” he said.
In this model, the burden shifts toward the wallet, embedding identity, compliance, and verification directly into the user’s device. Houlgrave added that merchants want compliance built in from the ground up.
“Compliance is always a top topic,” he noted. “Merchants really want to see that this is being built right from the ground up with compliance in mind.”
Houlgrave said the push toward stablecoin payments in retail is tied to cost pressures on retailers, including rising payment costs in-store. He pointed to expenses such as cash handling and card interchange fees, which can increase pricing and make alternative payment capabilities more attractive to merchants.
“There’s a lot of different cost structures in store with payments, including things like cash handling,” Houlgrave said. “That can often increase the pricing, which means that merchants are often interested in this capability.”
Houlgrave emphasized that scaling any payment method requires both merchant acceptance and consumer usage. He said neither side will move without the other, stressing the importance of being “merchant ready.”
He also said partnerships with terminal manufacturers can reduce friction by integrating stablecoin functionality into existing hardware ecosystems, helping merchants adopt without adding new devices.
“Most merchants want to accept crypto in a way that is just really compatible with their existing payment systems,” Houlgrave said. “They don’t want to have new terminals, new devices. … Most of them just want a really easy switch.”
Beyond enabling payments, Houlgrave said the second phase focuses on operational continuity. Once enabled, crypto payments should not disrupt existing workflows, including staff training, accounting, and refunds.
“It’s really thinking about all of these things end-to-end so that there’s predictability,” he said. “On an ongoing basis, this just settles to them and looks and feels like any other payment method.”
Jess Houlgrave is CEO of WalletConnect, an open-source protocol that acts as a secure bridge connecting crypto wallets to decentralized applications across various blockchains.
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