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…
Jan 19 2026
