WalletConnect🆚Visa: What is the difference in the 'trust infrastructure' of Web3 payments?
Many people compare WalletConnect to 'on-chain Visa', but the underlying logic of the two is completely different. Let's look at Visa first: when you swipe your credit card to pay at the supermarket, the money must first go through Visa's centralized server. The bank sends your consumption information to Visa, which verifies the limit and then notifies the merchant to collect payment. Throughout this process, Visa can see your consumption records and can freeze transactions at any time. Essentially, this is 'trust backed by a centralized institution'.
On the other hand, WalletConnect, as an open-source protocol, has never touched any funds or user data since its inception: for example, if you use Trust Wallet to connect to Uniswap to exchange for USDT, the transaction data will only be transmitted between your wallet and the Uniswap contract. WalletConnect is only responsible for 'creating a connection', meaning it cannot see how much currency you exchanged or interfere with the transaction.
Now let's look at the coverage: Visa mainly connects offline merchants and online e-commerce (such as Taobao / Amazon), and its scenarios are limited to fiat currency payments. However, WalletConnect can simultaneously support more than 150 public chains, including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, etc. Whether you are playing StepN in Solana's Phantom wallet, staking in Aptos's Martian wallet, or participating in DeFi mining in BSC's MetaMask, you can connect with one click through it. It's like Visa only covers 'one street offline', while it covers the entire Web3 'commercial complex'. This is the essential difference between Web3 trust infrastructure and traditional payment infrastructure.