When you look at a protocol like @WalletConnect , it’s easy to get swept up in the marketing. Big integration numbers, partnerships, new features—on the surface, it all looks great. But if you want to know whether $WCT and the network are actually working, you have to grade it like a skeptic. That means digging into the numbers that don’t make the headlines.

What To Track

If I were doing the grading, here’s the list I’d start with:

  • Governance activity: Count how many proposals actually go onchain, how many people show up to vote, and whether any of them really touched fees or operator rules. If all the votes are about cosmetics, it’s theater.

  • Operator set: How many relays are running? Where are they based? Are they all the same handful of orgs, or is there genuine geographic and organizational diversity?

  • Performance reports: Uptime and latency are the lifeblood of a relay network. If those aren’t published, you’re flying blind.


  • Fee flow: Can you see revenue publicly, and does it actually route into the token economy? If fees never touch $WCT, utility is just a buzzword.


  • Staking data: Look at utilization rates and what net yields look like after emissions. Is staking just farming giveaways, or is it tied to real work?

  • UX metrics: Are Smart Sessions and Link Mode showing up in reconnection success rates and session duration? The only way to know is data.

How To Interpret

The numbers by themselves don’t mean much unless you know how to read them:

  • Low turnout in governance → token voting is window dressing.

  • Lots of operators with similar uptime → healthy competition.


  • Rewards that are lumpy or opaque → favoritism or bad design.

  • Steady improvements in session metrics → Smart Sessions and Link Mode aren’t just press releases, they’re deployed.

  • Fee flow that’s visible and public → real utility, not hand-waving.


It doesn’t have to be flawless. It just has to be honest.

My Take

If you want to be taken seriously as infrastructure, you can’t just post slick decks when things are going well. Publish the ugly along with the pretty. If something breaks, put out a postmortem, fix it, and move forward. That’s how trust is built in real systems.

#WalletConnect doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be transparent. Because in the long run, protocols that show their homework always beat the ones that only show the highlight reel.