Crypto Beyond Speculation: Enterprise, Payments, and Apps | DAS London 2025 | Day 1 | Institutional
Summary
Enterprise and Payments: The discussion highlighted the growing importance of enterprise and payments in the crypto space, with a focus on stablecoins and production-ready solutions rather than speculative use cases.
Wallet Connect's Growth: Jess Wholegrave from Wallet Connect shared that the network is set to handle $400 billion in value transfer this year, with significant growth in DeFi and payments use cases.
Mastercard's Crypto Strategy: Christian Ralph from Mastercard emphasized the company's engagement in the crypto space, focusing on stablecoins and digital assets as transformative for the payment industry.
User Experience Challenges: Both speakers stressed the need for improved user experience in crypto payments, comparing the current state to early internet challenges and highlighting the potential for a seamless, iPod-like moment in crypto.
Regulatory Environment: The conversation touched on the importance of regulation, such as the Genius Act and Mika, in providing consumer protection and fostering sustainable innovation in the crypto industry.
Future Trends: Looking forward, the speakers expressed excitement about new payment forms, including in-store crypto payments and recurring payment standards, which are expected to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.
Stablecoin Chains Debate: The panel concluded with a debate on the necessity of stablecoin-specific chains, with differing views on their importance for future innovation and user experience.
Transcript
Thank you everyone to for joining the Block Works Silent Disco. I can feel the energy in the room. It's really great. And so part of that's because we're talking payments and enterprise and have two excellent guests here uh to discuss that with us. We have Jess Wholegrave from Wallet Connect and Christian Ralph from Mastercard. So let me kick it over to you guys for some introductions before we dive in. Great to uh great to see everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm Jess Wholegrave. I'm the CEO at Wallet Connect. Um, payments is close to my heart because prior to this I was at a European acquirer, Checkout.com. Um, and Wallet Connect has been around since 2018. We connect apps and wallets fundamentally to allow them to exchange information and um, results often in onchain transactions. So, this year we'll do about $400 billion of value transfer across the Wallet Connect network. Um, we work with hundreds of different wallets, custodians, software wallets, mobile wallets, hardware wallets. Um, and on the other side, everyone from payment service providers to DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces and and more. My name is Christian. I'm leading crypto and digital asset go to market for Mastercard. Mastercard, yap, is one of the leading digital payment networks. uh we've been doing this for 50 odd years and uh as we see that the world around us changes uh we need to change so I think a lot of people see that they don't pull their cards too much anymore but use their phones and obviously uh blockchain and digital assets will again mark a uh significant change uh for the payment industry and that's why we are engaging in this space. Yeah fantastic. So both of these segments, enterprise and payments are very perennial topics across market cycles. I mean going back to 2017, enterprise was top of mind for a lot of people and right now stable coins and payments are top of mind for a lot of people. So uh from your respective seats, what are the trends and kind of market dynamics that you're focused most closely on and most interested in right now? Um so we have I think in the last year or so seen um payments as a segment really probably one of our fastest growing segments. About 65% of what we do on the wallet connect network is um DeFi. The rest you can kind of split across various things. Payments is still sub 1% so it's still very very early. Um but we're seeing those numbers grow sometimes 100% month on month. So we're talking here about various different payments use cases. consumers being able to pay for goods and services either online or in store. Um payouts as another use case. Um connecting a crypto wallet to a card for example to allow for a payments flow. Um so I think what's what's really interesting for me this cycle versus some of the cycles that we've seen before is that a lot of this is actually production. um it's not a kind of um proof of concept press release coming from a big company about hey we're doing something in crypto and then you kind of never see it happen. Um what's actually happening now as part of this cycle is is work that's going into production that's actually ending up in the hands of of consumers. Um and that for me is is really exciting. A because it means that technology is getting out there. B, it comes with a whole load of new user experience challenges, which is what we love to solve at at Wallet Connect. So whether that's around um different assets on different chains, how do I as a an end user know what what asset my chain is on, how do I spend it, these are all complications that we have to solve, but it's cool to see this technology really out there and being used. We always enter in into these industry with a strong payment background, right? And at the beginning it was all about Bitcoin and Ethereum. You want to invest, you want to get uh rich very quickly. Uh which is still you know part of the appeal to certain parts of the industry. But we see that as we migrate towards uh stable coins and related use cases. It's more of our natural habitat and we were providing a lot of value I would think in the on-ramp and off-ramp and there's a lot of very interesting use cases around spending your crypto in different shapes and forms but we see now that you know having yieldbearing assets in in wallets self-custodial centralized wallets um that's really interesting and we see that this can be uh the next generation of fintech uh basically following the mobile first challenger banks that started in Europe some 12 15 years back. Um and that's what what's interesting and a lot of the themes that Jeff spoke to resonate because for us interoperability, safety, security, compliance, all of these are sort of uh you know non-negotiable musthaves and we see that the industry on the back of regulation and and I want to say mature overall maturing is is heading in this direction. Yeah, absolutely. So legacy fintech and legacy card providers I think do UX really well. I think it's very easy. Everyone would agree. So you mentioned kind of some of the UX challenges and tradeoffs like maybe self-custody or onboarding. Tell us about how you approach some of those tradeoffs and kind of just the general view of those things. I would disagree with legacy. Let's call it incumbent. Let's settle for incumbent please. Um, so a and I think this is really it's a really fair point because other than people in this room, nobody says I want to do an onchain transaction. Like nobody says I want to do an ISO 222 realtime payment. This is just not how it works, right? People want to subscribe to Netflix uh or buy new sneakers or whatever. Um, and for me the bar in terms of user experience is really a tokenized debit card on my iPhone. That's and there's Google people obviously, but um, I think this is really where the bar sits and the industry needs to mature and go in this direction because all this bridging uh, from one chain to the other and conversion. Um, this works for I would say 3 to 5% of the global population that really have a crypto first mindset. It works for people I want to say in the global south that are you know don't have access to um financial systems like we do here in Western Europe when it comes to inflationary environment, monetary policy. So these people are willing to jump through hoops and hoops. Uh but I think if you want to get to the next I don't know 10 15 25% of users um the user experience needs to be more at the center of discussion and I feel that this is really uh what the industry is also recognizing and I think there's so much potential right um self-custody for me can be what open banking always promised to be never really delivered so you know owning my assets having very convenient and services plucked into via platforms such as wallet connect thing there's so much potential and it's for me it's almost a normal maturing cycle right handing MP3s before the iPod was there was a nightmare right you you download it you move it to a USB stick and then oh it screws up the MP ID3 text all few people will remember and and I think in crypto we are almost still in this early phase and we now need that you know the iPod moment moment where we say okay this is an industrialized uh you know streamlined uh experience that's a bit my perspective yeah I mean I think the what a lot of people especially if they come purely from a crypto background think is like oh crypto is going to be the next payments technology right and crypto is a great settlement rail um but payment as probably Christian will know better than anybody else is not just about the settlement of value it's about all of the other things that go around that it's about the user user experience of actually um affecting that payment. It's about the information exchange that takes place between a merchant and everybody in in between and and the end user. Um it can be around the exchange of shipping information and things like this. Um we also forget that sometimes payments isn't just a one-click push payment as we are very familiar with in the crypto payments uh in the crypto space, but actually a huge amount of the payments that we use every day as consumers are recurring payments. They're pull payments. there all sorts of other things which crypto technology today is still a little bit clunky for. Um and so I think Christian's right the bar the user experience bar that we have to meet as an industry is incredibly high um and we need an awful lot of investment to make sure that that user experience is just as seamless whether that's around fraud and risk and um consumer chargebacks. How do we think about consumer protections in the crypto space? Um, so there's a lot of infrastructure that's still to be built around that before we have a a kind of comparable experience between between web 2 and web 3. Um, I think a lot of it we're getting there. We're starting to solve. Um, but uh but every time in crypto we solve one challenge, we seem to create more for ourselves. Um, and so the next few years is going to be really interesting when we think about all of these different assets on different chains and having to interact um, for the first time with this like self-custody world that's sort of in a bit isolated from the traditional financial system. Um, and as these two worlds meet, how do they interact in a kind of compliant and safe way for for end users? Yeah. So you mentioned an iPhone moment um in thinking about what's kind of crypto's breakout use case. A frequent debate in the space is what's crypto's best product market fit. And so the title of this session is beyond speculation um because speculation is often posited as crypto's best product market fit with directional bets, per trading, all the things we're familiar with. But how would you respond to that? Do you think that these more kind of less uh speculative use cases are crypto's product market fit? I mean for me it's almost like you know if you have a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail. So when we look at things we always want to learn how we can use it for for payments right so my and I don't there might be other use cases right we talked about provenence on block blockchain which might be super interesting for luxury goods or pharmaceuticals but for us it is it is payments and I like the idea of stable coins and um quite a bit because as just mentioned crypto or stable coins can be a very potent and highly performant settlement leg and if we embed this almost as a new engine into traditional financial services that work very very well uh I think that can be a very potent mix because uh we today we offer global interoperability between 3.8 8 billion cards in 150 million physical acceptance locations, right? And but when you tap your phone or you enter something on the website, essentially that's only the authorization that is happening. Few few people appreciate that and nobody should really care as long as it works safe and simple. But then all the sort of the the the dark work uh behind the curtain when it comes to moving the money I think stable coins have a very interesting role to play there and that's why we are very um bullish about that industry Jess any thoughts there yeah look I mean I think the um crypto is such a broadreaching technology that it's going to find different pockets of product market fit all over the place speculation was one and and an early one But that's actually quite common with new technologies. Anything that touches the seven deadly sins, you you typically find uh people getting excited about early on. We see that even when the internet started to emerge, what was the early use cases of the internet? So, it's no surprise to me that that's that found product market fit for crypto early on. What I think is exciting about this moment in time is it's not just about a niche group of people who are going to be interested and benefit by that aspect of the technology. But as we start to embed these rails in the things that every single one of us use every day, um probably without knowing it, we're going to on board billions of new users to this technology. And they're not going to have to go through the pain points of like self- custody necessarily, although some of them may want to. Um, but hopefully we're going to create this very very seamless onboarding experience so that everybody's using this under the hood. It's going to bring a whole load of efficiency benefits uh and and much more to individuals. Um, and so I think we'll we're going to see um much wider adoption as a result of this type of application of the technology. Yeah, certainly. Well, one of the things about this moment in time is kind of the regulatory formation that's occurring. So just had Genius passed about a month ago in the US. What are your contributions in those conversations and what are some of the kind of banner things that you think in these spaces have to be included in that regulatory formation? I mean for us it's it's self- custody. Um we have a network of hundreds of different wallets, millions and millions of end users who use those wallets. Um, and for me it's really important that those users of wallets can interact with the with the traditional financial world. So when we're talking um about policy, my my question is always like how how does a self-custodial wallet come into play here? We had this um you know when Mika came in in Europe at the end of last year, we had this like mad rush of people being like hey can you help us because for the first time I'm not going to be able to just send copy and paste an a a wallet address into my exchange and be able to send funds from my self-custodial account to my exchange account. So suddenly all of these types of flows in crypto in Europe were coming under travel rule compliance and everyone was panicking how do we how do we solve that? Um and at wallet connect we have specific messaging types that allow you to do that. So we worked a lot with the industry to enable self-custodial wallets to to stay plugged in to the to the crypto exchanges. And I can see the same possibility as we think about payments regulation and other things. It's like we need to make sure that we don't end up with this two tier of um you know if you're in self-custody you can't interact with the rest of the financial world and you can only have crypto in your neo bank account. Um we really want to make sure that these two worlds can can operate well together. Um, but I think that on the on the very positive side, I do think things like the Genius Act and um and just the way that regulators are starting to think about this is is very positive for us overall. I wouldn't I wouldn't say that we because back to your question, how do does Mastercard actually contribute to the regulation regulatory process? I would say quite little honestly. But I think what we see is that regulation that uh puts consumer protection and sustainable innovation at the at the center of the discussion and allows for a level playing field um is essential because it moves away a lot of uncertainty and sort of removes hesitation on consumer side. Because in in the traditional financial system we are all used to deposit insurance, zero liability, chargeback rights and you know almost uh suspenders and a belt right and in crypto there's no often times especially in self- custody there's nobody to call right if I do something stupid um you know I could put my lifetime savings at risk. So I believe that regulation um such as Mika such as um the Genius Act which again doesn't protect people from people from being stupid but it uh puts a regulatory framework around crypto um helps the crypto players operate by the rules because everybody asked them to operate by the rules but if there's none it's admittedly hard. It makes it way easier for us and other sort of trati or incumbent players to engage because uh yeah we we have an a reputation and existing business that we don't want to jeopardize. So again I think nuanced uh consumer protection and sustainable innovation oriented regulation is very very good. Um and then again it depends on you know you can always debate about the small print how that should look like but I think direction of travel is positive. So if you want to sit with the adults right not by the children table and say oh we're all unregulated I think that works as long as you as you do things in in a niche or very small part of the market but as you grow and people will look ah what are they doing that's really interesting but if you do financial services at some point the question is is that regulated um will come and I don't think it's a bad question per se I don't think it's a bad question yeah with genius that bill the acronym I I it didn't connect with me. I love the acronyms they come up with, but I think could have done a little better with that one, I think. Um, last question before we wrap up. Uh, we're sitting here October of 2025. It's been the largest year for payments and enterprise use cases. Looking ahead, what are you excited about? what's coming down the pipeline that you're looking at and thinking this is going to be really impactful product-wise, trendwise, anything. Um, so if if the trajectory continues or direction of travel, I'm already very happy. I'm very interested in risk-free assets, whether it's stable coins or tokenized money market funds that consumers would be more open to spend versus uh you know, Bitcoin, which a lot of people would reference to as digital gold. So, I think moving further into the uh payment um direction makes it even more interesting. But again, if the direction of travel holds, I think we're we're in a good we're in a good place. Um, I'm very excited about um seeing different forms of payments start to start to emerge. We touched obviously on on consumer payins. Um, we launched last week with a point of sale device to allow crypto wallets to pay in store at at some point of sale companies. Um, I think payouts use cases are another one that I'm I'm endlessly excited about. So we stop this these painful um crossber movements for for for end consumers. Um so I think we're going to start to see a lot there. We're working also on recurring payments standards. Um a lot of this requires like deep uh chain level uh EIPs and standards to be written and takes years to to evolve. So, we're starting to see the adoption of some of those standards this year with the latest Ethereum upgrades that that will allow for for efficient recurring payments um from crypto wallets. So, I think all of that is setting us up over the next few years to um to see these much more kind of useful and um you know closing that chasm to to web two uh over the next few few years. Yeah. Excellent. Okay, last question. Speed round. I'm going to put you on the spot here. You can plead the fifth if you want, but stable coin specific chains need them or don't need them. I say no. Unreflected answer. I say no. Love it. I mean, for me creates another another challenge for our team to solve, which is which is always fun. So, it keeps us busy. Um, you know, I think to suggest that the state of chains that we have today is the end state of chains is very naive. like there's a lot more that we can do. So I think the more innovation we see right now, the closer we're going to get to a great enduser experience. Might be a bit of a winding journey, but I think uh all innovation right now is what we should be encouraging so that we can see what see what the best-in-class will really look like. Well, thank you both. Let's give it up for Jess and Christian.
Crypto Beyond Speculation: Enterprise, Payments, and Apps | DAS London 2025 | Day 1 | Institutional
Summary
Transcript
Thank you everyone to for joining the Block Works Silent Disco. I can feel the energy in the room. It's really great. And so part of that's because we're talking payments and enterprise and have two excellent guests here uh to discuss that with us. We have Jess Wholegrave from Wallet Connect and Christian Ralph from Mastercard. So let me kick it over to you guys for some introductions before we dive in. Great to uh great to see everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm Jess Wholegrave. I'm the CEO at Wallet Connect. Um, payments is close to my heart because prior to this I was at a European acquirer, Checkout.com. Um, and Wallet Connect has been around since 2018. We connect apps and wallets fundamentally to allow them to exchange information and um, results often in onchain transactions. So, this year we'll do about $400 billion of value transfer across the Wallet Connect network. Um, we work with hundreds of different wallets, custodians, software wallets, mobile wallets, hardware wallets. Um, and on the other side, everyone from payment service providers to DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces and and more. My name is Christian. I'm leading crypto and digital asset go to market for Mastercard. Mastercard, yap, is one of the leading digital payment networks. uh we've been doing this for 50 odd years and uh as we see that the world around us changes uh we need to change so I think a lot of people see that they don't pull their cards too much anymore but use their phones and obviously uh blockchain and digital assets will again mark a uh significant change uh for the payment industry and that's why we are engaging in this space. Yeah fantastic. So both of these segments, enterprise and payments are very perennial topics across market cycles. I mean going back to 2017, enterprise was top of mind for a lot of people and right now stable coins and payments are top of mind for a lot of people. So uh from your respective seats, what are the trends and kind of market dynamics that you're focused most closely on and most interested in right now? Um so we have I think in the last year or so seen um payments as a segment really probably one of our fastest growing segments. About 65% of what we do on the wallet connect network is um DeFi. The rest you can kind of split across various things. Payments is still sub 1% so it's still very very early. Um but we're seeing those numbers grow sometimes 100% month on month. So we're talking here about various different payments use cases. consumers being able to pay for goods and services either online or in store. Um payouts as another use case. Um connecting a crypto wallet to a card for example to allow for a payments flow. Um so I think what's what's really interesting for me this cycle versus some of the cycles that we've seen before is that a lot of this is actually production. um it's not a kind of um proof of concept press release coming from a big company about hey we're doing something in crypto and then you kind of never see it happen. Um what's actually happening now as part of this cycle is is work that's going into production that's actually ending up in the hands of of consumers. Um and that for me is is really exciting. A because it means that technology is getting out there. B, it comes with a whole load of new user experience challenges, which is what we love to solve at at Wallet Connect. So whether that's around um different assets on different chains, how do I as a an end user know what what asset my chain is on, how do I spend it, these are all complications that we have to solve, but it's cool to see this technology really out there and being used. We always enter in into these industry with a strong payment background, right? And at the beginning it was all about Bitcoin and Ethereum. You want to invest, you want to get uh rich very quickly. Uh which is still you know part of the appeal to certain parts of the industry. But we see that as we migrate towards uh stable coins and related use cases. It's more of our natural habitat and we were providing a lot of value I would think in the on-ramp and off-ramp and there's a lot of very interesting use cases around spending your crypto in different shapes and forms but we see now that you know having yieldbearing assets in in wallets self-custodial centralized wallets um that's really interesting and we see that this can be uh the next generation of fintech uh basically following the mobile first challenger banks that started in Europe some 12 15 years back. Um and that's what what's interesting and a lot of the themes that Jeff spoke to resonate because for us interoperability, safety, security, compliance, all of these are sort of uh you know non-negotiable musthaves and we see that the industry on the back of regulation and and I want to say mature overall maturing is is heading in this direction. Yeah, absolutely. So legacy fintech and legacy card providers I think do UX really well. I think it's very easy. Everyone would agree. So you mentioned kind of some of the UX challenges and tradeoffs like maybe self-custody or onboarding. Tell us about how you approach some of those tradeoffs and kind of just the general view of those things. I would disagree with legacy. Let's call it incumbent. Let's settle for incumbent please. Um, so a and I think this is really it's a really fair point because other than people in this room, nobody says I want to do an onchain transaction. Like nobody says I want to do an ISO 222 realtime payment. This is just not how it works, right? People want to subscribe to Netflix uh or buy new sneakers or whatever. Um, and for me the bar in terms of user experience is really a tokenized debit card on my iPhone. That's and there's Google people obviously, but um, I think this is really where the bar sits and the industry needs to mature and go in this direction because all this bridging uh, from one chain to the other and conversion. Um, this works for I would say 3 to 5% of the global population that really have a crypto first mindset. It works for people I want to say in the global south that are you know don't have access to um financial systems like we do here in Western Europe when it comes to inflationary environment, monetary policy. So these people are willing to jump through hoops and hoops. Uh but I think if you want to get to the next I don't know 10 15 25% of users um the user experience needs to be more at the center of discussion and I feel that this is really uh what the industry is also recognizing and I think there's so much potential right um self-custody for me can be what open banking always promised to be never really delivered so you know owning my assets having very convenient and services plucked into via platforms such as wallet connect thing there's so much potential and it's for me it's almost a normal maturing cycle right handing MP3s before the iPod was there was a nightmare right you you download it you move it to a USB stick and then oh it screws up the MP ID3 text all few people will remember and and I think in crypto we are almost still in this early phase and we now need that you know the iPod moment moment where we say okay this is an industrialized uh you know streamlined uh experience that's a bit my perspective yeah I mean I think the what a lot of people especially if they come purely from a crypto background think is like oh crypto is going to be the next payments technology right and crypto is a great settlement rail um but payment as probably Christian will know better than anybody else is not just about the settlement of value it's about all of the other things that go around that it's about the user user experience of actually um affecting that payment. It's about the information exchange that takes place between a merchant and everybody in in between and and the end user. Um it can be around the exchange of shipping information and things like this. Um we also forget that sometimes payments isn't just a one-click push payment as we are very familiar with in the crypto payments uh in the crypto space, but actually a huge amount of the payments that we use every day as consumers are recurring payments. They're pull payments. there all sorts of other things which crypto technology today is still a little bit clunky for. Um and so I think Christian's right the bar the user experience bar that we have to meet as an industry is incredibly high um and we need an awful lot of investment to make sure that that user experience is just as seamless whether that's around fraud and risk and um consumer chargebacks. How do we think about consumer protections in the crypto space? Um, so there's a lot of infrastructure that's still to be built around that before we have a a kind of comparable experience between between web 2 and web 3. Um, I think a lot of it we're getting there. We're starting to solve. Um, but uh but every time in crypto we solve one challenge, we seem to create more for ourselves. Um, and so the next few years is going to be really interesting when we think about all of these different assets on different chains and having to interact um, for the first time with this like self-custody world that's sort of in a bit isolated from the traditional financial system. Um, and as these two worlds meet, how do they interact in a kind of compliant and safe way for for end users? Yeah. So you mentioned an iPhone moment um in thinking about what's kind of crypto's breakout use case. A frequent debate in the space is what's crypto's best product market fit. And so the title of this session is beyond speculation um because speculation is often posited as crypto's best product market fit with directional bets, per trading, all the things we're familiar with. But how would you respond to that? Do you think that these more kind of less uh speculative use cases are crypto's product market fit? I mean for me it's almost like you know if you have a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail. So when we look at things we always want to learn how we can use it for for payments right so my and I don't there might be other use cases right we talked about provenence on block blockchain which might be super interesting for luxury goods or pharmaceuticals but for us it is it is payments and I like the idea of stable coins and um quite a bit because as just mentioned crypto or stable coins can be a very potent and highly performant settlement leg and if we embed this almost as a new engine into traditional financial services that work very very well uh I think that can be a very potent mix because uh we today we offer global interoperability between 3.8 8 billion cards in 150 million physical acceptance locations, right? And but when you tap your phone or you enter something on the website, essentially that's only the authorization that is happening. Few few people appreciate that and nobody should really care as long as it works safe and simple. But then all the sort of the the the dark work uh behind the curtain when it comes to moving the money I think stable coins have a very interesting role to play there and that's why we are very um bullish about that industry Jess any thoughts there yeah look I mean I think the um crypto is such a broadreaching technology that it's going to find different pockets of product market fit all over the place speculation was one and and an early one But that's actually quite common with new technologies. Anything that touches the seven deadly sins, you you typically find uh people getting excited about early on. We see that even when the internet started to emerge, what was the early use cases of the internet? So, it's no surprise to me that that's that found product market fit for crypto early on. What I think is exciting about this moment in time is it's not just about a niche group of people who are going to be interested and benefit by that aspect of the technology. But as we start to embed these rails in the things that every single one of us use every day, um probably without knowing it, we're going to on board billions of new users to this technology. And they're not going to have to go through the pain points of like self- custody necessarily, although some of them may want to. Um, but hopefully we're going to create this very very seamless onboarding experience so that everybody's using this under the hood. It's going to bring a whole load of efficiency benefits uh and and much more to individuals. Um, and so I think we'll we're going to see um much wider adoption as a result of this type of application of the technology. Yeah, certainly. Well, one of the things about this moment in time is kind of the regulatory formation that's occurring. So just had Genius passed about a month ago in the US. What are your contributions in those conversations and what are some of the kind of banner things that you think in these spaces have to be included in that regulatory formation? I mean for us it's it's self- custody. Um we have a network of hundreds of different wallets, millions and millions of end users who use those wallets. Um, and for me it's really important that those users of wallets can interact with the with the traditional financial world. So when we're talking um about policy, my my question is always like how how does a self-custodial wallet come into play here? We had this um you know when Mika came in in Europe at the end of last year, we had this like mad rush of people being like hey can you help us because for the first time I'm not going to be able to just send copy and paste an a a wallet address into my exchange and be able to send funds from my self-custodial account to my exchange account. So suddenly all of these types of flows in crypto in Europe were coming under travel rule compliance and everyone was panicking how do we how do we solve that? Um and at wallet connect we have specific messaging types that allow you to do that. So we worked a lot with the industry to enable self-custodial wallets to to stay plugged in to the to the crypto exchanges. And I can see the same possibility as we think about payments regulation and other things. It's like we need to make sure that we don't end up with this two tier of um you know if you're in self-custody you can't interact with the rest of the financial world and you can only have crypto in your neo bank account. Um we really want to make sure that these two worlds can can operate well together. Um, but I think that on the on the very positive side, I do think things like the Genius Act and um and just the way that regulators are starting to think about this is is very positive for us overall. I wouldn't I wouldn't say that we because back to your question, how do does Mastercard actually contribute to the regulation regulatory process? I would say quite little honestly. But I think what we see is that regulation that uh puts consumer protection and sustainable innovation at the at the center of the discussion and allows for a level playing field um is essential because it moves away a lot of uncertainty and sort of removes hesitation on consumer side. Because in in the traditional financial system we are all used to deposit insurance, zero liability, chargeback rights and you know almost uh suspenders and a belt right and in crypto there's no often times especially in self- custody there's nobody to call right if I do something stupid um you know I could put my lifetime savings at risk. So I believe that regulation um such as Mika such as um the Genius Act which again doesn't protect people from people from being stupid but it uh puts a regulatory framework around crypto um helps the crypto players operate by the rules because everybody asked them to operate by the rules but if there's none it's admittedly hard. It makes it way easier for us and other sort of trati or incumbent players to engage because uh yeah we we have an a reputation and existing business that we don't want to jeopardize. So again I think nuanced uh consumer protection and sustainable innovation oriented regulation is very very good. Um and then again it depends on you know you can always debate about the small print how that should look like but I think direction of travel is positive. So if you want to sit with the adults right not by the children table and say oh we're all unregulated I think that works as long as you as you do things in in a niche or very small part of the market but as you grow and people will look ah what are they doing that's really interesting but if you do financial services at some point the question is is that regulated um will come and I don't think it's a bad question per se I don't think it's a bad question yeah with genius that bill the acronym I I it didn't connect with me. I love the acronyms they come up with, but I think could have done a little better with that one, I think. Um, last question before we wrap up. Uh, we're sitting here October of 2025. It's been the largest year for payments and enterprise use cases. Looking ahead, what are you excited about? what's coming down the pipeline that you're looking at and thinking this is going to be really impactful product-wise, trendwise, anything. Um, so if if the trajectory continues or direction of travel, I'm already very happy. I'm very interested in risk-free assets, whether it's stable coins or tokenized money market funds that consumers would be more open to spend versus uh you know, Bitcoin, which a lot of people would reference to as digital gold. So, I think moving further into the uh payment um direction makes it even more interesting. But again, if the direction of travel holds, I think we're we're in a good we're in a good place. Um, I'm very excited about um seeing different forms of payments start to start to emerge. We touched obviously on on consumer payins. Um, we launched last week with a point of sale device to allow crypto wallets to pay in store at at some point of sale companies. Um, I think payouts use cases are another one that I'm I'm endlessly excited about. So we stop this these painful um crossber movements for for for end consumers. Um so I think we're going to start to see a lot there. We're working also on recurring payments standards. Um a lot of this requires like deep uh chain level uh EIPs and standards to be written and takes years to to evolve. So, we're starting to see the adoption of some of those standards this year with the latest Ethereum upgrades that that will allow for for efficient recurring payments um from crypto wallets. So, I think all of that is setting us up over the next few years to um to see these much more kind of useful and um you know closing that chasm to to web two uh over the next few few years. Yeah. Excellent. Okay, last question. Speed round. I'm going to put you on the spot here. You can plead the fifth if you want, but stable coin specific chains need them or don't need them. I say no. Unreflected answer. I say no. Love it. I mean, for me creates another another challenge for our team to solve, which is which is always fun. So, it keeps us busy. Um, you know, I think to suggest that the state of chains that we have today is the end state of chains is very naive. like there's a lot more that we can do. So I think the more innovation we see right now, the closer we're going to get to a great enduser experience. Might be a bit of a winding journey, but I think uh all innovation right now is what we should be encouraging so that we can see what see what the best-in-class will really look like. Well, thank you both. Let's give it up for Jess and Christian.