The Future of Crypto - Without Exchanges? - Eowyn Chen CEO, Trust Wallet

Wasn't the last conversation that we're having of day one. It's been fantastic day here in Paris. Cointelegraph obviously doing a live stream in partnership with Proof of Talk. And I'm now joined by Eoin Chen from Trust Wallet. Eoin, it's great to chat to you again. I've had the pleasure quite a few times in my career. First of all, how are you enjoying Paris? How are you enjoying the event?

Oh, I love Paris. I think it's beautiful weather, beautiful environment and then people are intellectually curious. Curious. I'm having one of the highest intellectual conversations around here, so that's great.

Yeah. Look, I genuinely mean this. When I first came to Proof of Talk last year, I was very presently surprised because it was an event that kind of came out of nowhere and had a fantastic lineup of speakers and really good access to people. So it's been great for me so far. We're looking forward to having a lot more really engaging conversations. If you are just joining us on the live stream, please do go ahead and drop your questions and comments for Aowin. Please try and pose some of these questions to her as the live stream goes along. But feel free. If you want to ask about Trust Wallet, if you want to ask about stablecoins, if you want to ask about self custody versus custody and exchanges, have at it.

I think I told that this is.

A hassi, so yeah, well, there we go. I never asked too hard questions, so we'll keep it relaxed. Ewin, maybe we can just chat about the landscape in the US A lot has changed there. I was in the United states for Bitcoin 2025. It was really interesting to see the amount of politicians and big mainstream institutions present at that event and conversely the amount of conversations that were happening at a bitcoin conference about stablecoins. So let's talk about stablecoins. I think it's one of the biggest narratives in the industry right now. Bitcoin still commands a massive market cap, but if you look at something like tether, it's a $150 billion market cap. Circle just went public last week, which I think was a really fantastic milestone for the industry and really signaling that traditional finance and financial institutions are interested in figuring out a better way of moving money around the world. And it seems like CBDCs are gone and stablecoins are here to stay. What are your general thoughts on the stablecoin landscape?

I think stablecoin is undoubtedly one of the tokens or one of the few tokens that find product Market fit. Right? Right. Viral product market fit. I think it has a lot to do in the historical context too. When the treasury bills interest rate are increasing starting from the COVID time and we're after the COVID times. And then you also solved one of the biggest problem within the industry about fluctuation. And I think right now it becomes the most important bridge between crypto and tri. With so many traffic interests coming onto the crypto space. I do believe that stablecoin is the cornerstone for a lot of the traffic opportunities to further go on chain. Without stablecoin it will be a lot harder. So I'm very bullish on stablecoin. And I think it's also politically at this moment that it gets the aha awakening moment outside of that crypto space to realize how important stablecoin can be an opportunity for them. So you further fuse the institutional momentums coming in. So I think that's fantastic. But on the other side, people talk a lot about institutional opportunity. I get to see a lot of retail opportunity and I love doing retail businesses is because we get to see the pain points of the world earlier and faster. Stablecoin got first adopted besides trading is also because of the disadvantage of the world needs a better assets to hedge their fiat when it's coming down to the really terrible inflation moments. So it's actually where the debanked where the disadvantage are getting the stablecoin into everybody people's hands a lot more. And the data that I was seeing in last year September is that it was already a bull market. But there are about $10 billion worth of stake USDT not moving for six months. What does that mean? It means that people coming down to crypto not because of the speculative reasons, they're not even thinking about whatever yields because it's not even moving. It's just because people wanted to hold US dollar assets. And then crypto provides this global access network that traditionally retail people or disadvantaged people debanked people cannot have access to. And I think that's actually a very meaningful impact that stablecoin had earlier, even before all this political movement and realizations too. And that leads us to develop that product features to give users our earning opportunity besides holding stablecoin. So we launched the stablecoin earn that people can just deposit USDT, USDC, USDA into the major chains and then earn 4 to 6% of the yield without any lockup period of time. And I think this is a much more fantastic way to provide micro savings account banking services for the people that otherwise would not be able to afford the bank accounts in many of the countries. And then the adoption is also quite good. It's as expected. The adoption mostly come from retail. Retail, not the major wealth that you will imagine from the institutions. And in one day, in four weeks, it passes 30 million and then this is accumulation of $50, $100, $200, those kind of checks. And that's when I find the adoptions and the impact that crypto can have in people's life is heartwarming.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've had many conversations with Paolo Arduino from Tether and he often talks about USDT not being important for Americans or Europeans, but for the rest of the world, developing countries, you know, countries that are facing hyperinflation and that sort of thing, they're looking to the US dollar and a few other harder currencies. They're all fiat currencies, but there's still a better store of value than their local currency. And finally we have infrastructure rails that allow them to do that. And that is why you're seeing this. My second question to you, you mentioned the stablecoin earn product. Where do you get the yield from and how do you do that? And also how important has legislation like the Genius act in America been in allowing stablecoins to reach, you know, their ultimate sort of use case, which is payments and then storing value and earning some interest on saving your money?

Yeah, I think the stablecoin yield is always an interesting question where the yield comes from. So far we use a completely decentralized way to plug into the the defi protocol yields. But those are very good partners that we work with that truly holds up the security and the compliance standards.

AAVE and the likes or a few other players.

Yes, Morphle AAVE compounds. Yeah, they're all kind of the ones that already survived the ups and downs of the markets and figure out the sustainable path to it. But I know that there are lots of other opportunity to potentially plug in off chain yield that potentially can allow this stablecoin to be able to power real economy. There are a lot of teams that I know that are kind of building things around it, but we will wait for them to mature a little bit more so that they can plug into the systems with regards to the regulations. I think stablecoin is definitely one of the products that you want to have regulatory clarity to be able to unlock and connect to more payment channels, opportunities into the real lives for people. In this conference. There are lots of conversations around payments and then be able to Build on top of the stablecoin and then only stablecoin as the cornerstone gets the regulatory clarity. Then there are more traffic product on top of it that can feel not shaky.

Right.

Like for the fundamental reliance on the stablecoin that they have to be anchored on. So I think this is pretty bullish. And to be honest, US dollar, besides US dollar, I guess this euro are probably going to be the top two currency fiat currency assets that stablecoin format will be adopted the most. So it's good to see the US government leading the way and setting the tone so that hopefully Europe can follow.

I hope so too. I think one of the biggest sort of topics that I've been exploring of late is, you know, self custody versus custody solutions. You've got big centralized exchanges. A lot of people just leave a lot of value on exchanges and for the most part you should be fine. Right. There's a. There's a lot of protections in place that are, that are pretty decent but at the same time bad things happen. You look no further than the Bybit hack earlier this year, social engineering. Their systems get compromised and they drain $1.4 billion from an Ethereum hot wallet. That's one of the biggest exchanges. It's just a stark reminder. If you trust your coins to someone else, you are trusting them to look after your money. It's the same thing as you put it in a bank account. If there's a run on the banks and they're not managing their deposits properly, there's a risk. This is why things like Trust Wallet exist, right?

Yes.

Maybe you can just talk a little bit more about your philosophy on self custody, what the difficulties still are. There's a lot of responsibility on the user and what the trade offs are of that and why you think that most people should use something like Trust Wallet over something else.

Yeah. One of our mission is to provide people the freedom to own and the freedom to access opportunities, which is what we believe as the fundamental value proposition that why we come into the space. And I think freedom to own is so important philosophically because as we age we start to rely on so many intermediaries that we even lose the capabilities or use the confidence that you truly own. Something like looking at your fiat dollars on the bank account. Right. Like how do you really make sure that that's your bank account? What if someone made a database problems and then you can get wiped out. And I guess that those are the points where you don't have confidence that you truly own it. Hence you introduce regulations, monitoring to be able to hold accountability on the ones that can control it. But who knows whether there's black swan event. And that's why I think self custody is very important is because people should always have the option that they can own it themselves sometimes given my American background I use the analogy as the US Second amendments which is the right to own a gun. I know that it's not very common for the rest of the the world to have this opportunity but the reason why it is such an important fundamental constitutional rights in the US is because that yes, you're not going to use your gun every day as a convenience for you to guard your security. You will trust the police, you will trust the army to provide the security as a service and the infrastructure. But what if one day you're in this countryside you need to guard your own safety. You got to have your means to say I can own it, I can protect myself. And I think it's the same thing with self custody. I will be very honest, I don't think self custody is for everybody in all situations at all times it's always very important to find a combination of the custody solutions in the specific context for security. But it's very important for everybody to learn the skill, skill set to be able to know how to protect themselves and have the self custody. And that's what we do. But beyond that, what we can do better as an industry is to advance in technology and give people easier ways to do self custody. And that's what I believe in the one or two years we will solve significant problem with the easy to use recovery problem and self custody together.

I've got a couple of questions coming through on the live stream and please do keep your questions coming through if you have some burning questions for eowyn the first one, this is pretty spicy. How much user data do you actually collect despite the claims that you make? I think it's quite an interesting question especially from user data As a self.

Custodial solution we don't collect user ip. Even so there's not much user data except for some cohorts data. Let's say I will track users conversion rate from clicking this button to the next block button. If there are from the first week of March what's the conversion rate? Those are the data that we track because they fundamentally help us to improve our product and services and doesn't identify users personal information. This is a principle for us is that we do we hold the ISO certificate for privacy and then we're also operationally liable to make sure that we can be a light in the industry to hold, hold up to the privacy standards.

There's another one coming through and this is an existential one I think for the entire space from Steve Ala. If Apple Wallet came out tomorrow, would you survive? And I think that question goes for everyone in the industry.

Yeah, I think if Apple Wallet become a, well, self custody wallet just like Telegram Wallet, I think we already see this kind of examples coming in. You will probably be pretty big competitors but at the same time they will set the bar so high that for us to find unique value proposition that we have to offer, I don't think the space is one person eats it all because they are always a unique person's needs and there's always some kind of fundamental principle that Apple can do or cannot do that other companies or the product teams can make the decision for themselves. So you would definitely be a pressure but you will just press pressure us to do product experiences way better and find a unique value proposition better to serve the user's needs. So it will be nerve wracking but I think it's better for everybody.

What are some of the biggest competitors in terms of self custodial wallets that you look at today? Because I'm sure you guys do a lot of competitor analysis and what sets everyone apart from each other? Is there even a way to set each other apart?

I think it's the common names that people already know, the Metamask, the phantoms, Coinbase, wallet, etc. I think everybody have their own take even though the product looks very similar. For us simplicity is the most important thing because crypto is hard enough. So the key product design and technological design principle for us is always how do we simplify things assuming people don't have the knowledge. But there's also caveat. So for example, we don't want to sacrifice self custody and we don't want it to sacrifice sacrifice for privacy or security. So there's always a balance between how to uphold the most simple, easy to use while not sacrificing self custody security and privacy.

We spoke about some risks off mic. One of them is, you know this, this general theme of AI becoming ubiquitous across industries. Right?

Yeah.

You, you have some interesting thoughts on, on the risks that AI could, could pose to wallets. And I mean there's a lot of talk about people just using AI AI agents to manage wallets, to manage token payments, XYZ trading, whatever you want to do. You know, token swaps between different chains. What's your general view on AI? And do you believe it could pose a risk to your business and your users?

Yeah. A part of me really thinks that when we're building blockchain and crypto, we're building the the financial infrastructure or the future of the economic infrastructure for AI primarily and then the second is probably for human. But when it comes down to the risk of AI it's always about who's in control. Right. Like how much people are willing to give the authority and delegation to AI is the same question as if how much people want to delegate custody to custodians. Right. So if it's the same problem, same old problem that humans we have to make decision for ourselves. I don't think it's anything new, but I see a lot more opportunity for AI is that with the unlimited abundance of intelligence, I do think AI will probably execute and strategize better than human. So it's more about how do humans manage your team of AI agents to do the work for you? Then what does it mean for wallet? This is what I tell the team is that people can build the blockchain for AI, people can build the payment kind of APIs for AI. But we want to represent human. We want to make sure as a UI wallet how do I empower humans to thrive in the world of AI? And maybe what it our wallet will become a final AI agents but knows the user so intimately well. And then this trust AI will represent users to connect to your swap AI, your earn AI, your payment AI or anybody research AI, whatever it is. Right. For the benefits ultimately for the users. That's what I feel probably will likely happen in this agentic AI network of what the futures might be. But but we will stay true to where we provide value. Is the UI empowerment layer for human.

My final question to you. We briefly touched on real world asset tokenization. I look at Bitcoin, treasury companies like Strategy made a planet, all of these new stock offerings, tokenized securities is probably the best use case for RWA ways to take tradfi to, you know, the next level and just trade 24 7. How do you go about integrating that and do you think that it's sort of the missing link in the puzzle and a lot of self custodial wallets will be able to will allow people to just hold tokenized securities and manage the assets and own them themselves?

Yeah. How I see this is that if the vision is to make blockchain and crypto the future of the economic and financial infrastructure, then you wanted to make as many assets as accessible on this infrastructure and wallet is access for people to get access and manage for the different assets options. So fundamentally I don't see any difference with tokenized security or tokenized meme or tokenized anything from the user's perspective. So we just need to be the gateway and the door and the technological providers to facilitate users to be able to access and manage according to their own desire. There are a lot of infra providers we know are trying to make this kind of things happen. Like you do, you do need a tokenized layer, you need the compliance layer and then you need to find the right chain, you need to find the light liquidity pools. Those are all existing I think infra layer that we can just like modules and logos and people build them up together with wallets ultimately just need to open the doors for the users to make the choices. So if we put this into the Lego and modular framework then RWA or any kind of tokenized assets is just like another crypto assets.

Yeah, for sure. Erwin, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for watching at home, wherever you are around the world. This is the live stream of the proof of Work conference, Proof of Talk conference. Sorry my brain is leaving me very late in the day right here in Paris. We will be back.

You are in the hot seat.

Yeah, I am in the hot seat. I, I, I don't even know how to speak anymore. But yeah, please do join us again tomorrow if you enjoyed this conversation like and retweet the space if you've been watching on X. And of course give us a like and a subscribe on YouTube if you're watching us there. Keep the comments coming through and be sure to tune in tomorrow as we bring you loads of interviews and a live stream from the event here in Paris. Thank you very much for joining us.