Self-Custody Has Won the Argument, Now It Has to Work: Trust Wallet CEO (Interview)

Crypto has spent many years asking users to accept complexity in exchange for ownership. But as self-custody moves closer and closer to the mainstream audience, Trust Wallet’s new CEO, Felix Fan, argues that the real challenge is no longer proving why people should control their assets – it’s making that control feel effortless.

In the following interview, we discuss the product lessons shaping Fan’s leadership, why wallets must take more responsibility for user protection, how payments, trading, stablecoins, AI agents, and clear regulation are pushing crypto into a more mature phase.

His message, however, is clear: self-custody may have won the philosophical argument, but the user experience has some catching up to do.

You’ve stepped into a new role at Trust Wallet at a moment when self-custody is becoming both more mainstream and more complex. What parts of your own journey prepared you most for leading a product used by hundreds of millions of people?

My expertise lies in product, complemented by my experience as a serial entrepreneur. Before Trust Wallet, I spent years thinking about how to make complex financial tools feel simple to people who don’t have time or patience to become experts.

Leading at this scale is different. Trust Wallet already has millions of users. The job isn’t only to convince people that self-custody is the future. It’s to make that future feel obvious in the product experience every day. That means listening, moving fast, and being ruthlessly honest about where we fall short so we can fix it quickly.

The part of my journey that prepared me most? Learning that the best products don’t have to explain themselves. If a user has to read a guide to understand what just happened, we haven’t finished building yet.

Before joining Trust Wallet, you were known as a product leader. How does that background shape the way you think about leadership, especially in a sector where user trust, security, and speed of execution all matter at once?

Product thinking means you start with the user problem, not the solution. That sounds obvious, but it’s genuinely rare in crypto, where the default is to lead with technology and hope users catch up.

When I look at trust, security, and execution speed as competing priorities, I don’t see a tension. I see a product sequencing problem. Security can’t be a tax on speed — if it slows users down in a way that’s perceptible, we lose them to worse choices. So the answer is to engineer security that protects users before they know they need protection.

That’s what our Security Scanner does $458 million in prevented losses from malicious contracts. Users didn’t have to become security experts for that to happen. The product did the work. That’s what good product leadership looks like in this sector.

Crypto has gone through several identity shifts — speculation, DeFi, NFTs, institutional adoption, stablecoins, AI agents, RWAs, and more. How would you define the current phase of the industry?

I’d call it the infrastructure coming of age. For years, crypto had the vision, but the experience was too rough for most people to stay. The phases you describe, “speculation, DeFi, NFTs”, each added something real, but also came with so much friction that only the committed stayed.

What’s different now is that the rails are catching up with the ideas. Onchain liquidity is deep enough to compete. Stablecoins have real-world utility. Tokenized RWAs are more accessible. AI is starting to interact with onchain systems in ways that weren’t possible two years ago.

We’re at the point where the question isn’t “Can crypto do this?”, it’s “Can we make it simple enough that the next hundred million people don’t need to already believe in it to try it?”

Self-custody is often framed as a principle, but for mainstream users it can still feel intimidating. What has to change for self-custody to become as intuitive as mobile banking without compromising ownership?

Three things, in order.

First, the language has to change. “Private keys,” “seed phrases,” “non-custodial” etc, these are terms that mean something to insiders and nothing to everyone else. We have to build products that protect users deeply without requiring them to understand the underlying mechanics. That’s how mobile banking worked. You don’t know how your bank’s authentication stack works. You just feel safe.

Second, recovery has to feel safe. The thing that stops most people from trying self-custody isn’t the setup — it’s the fear of losing access permanently. Better recovery options, designed for real humans, not cryptographers, are one of the most important problems the industry needs to solve.

Third, the surrounding experience has to match what people already use. If trading onchain is harder than using an app they already have, we lose. The gap is closing, though there’s still work to be done.

The principle of self-custody is already winning the argument. The product experience is what has to catch up.

Trust Wallet now sits at the intersection of wallets, DeFi, payments, stablecoins, and AI. Where do you see the biggest near-term use case for crypto: trading, payments, savings, identity, AI agents, or something else?

Payments and trading for the near term.

Trading because onchain liquidity has matured. With integrations like Hyperliquid for perps, prediction markets, and tokenized stocks through bStocks, users can do things inside a self-custodial wallet that they’d have needed a traditional brokerage account or CEX for a few years ago.

AI agents are the category I watch most carefully for the medium term. The ability to automate strategies within rules you set, while keeping keys on your device, could meaningfully change the financial landscape. But we’re at the early-infrastructure stage there. In the near term, payments and trading are where the real use is happening.

Security remains one of crypto’s biggest barriers to adoption. What responsibility should wallets take in protecting users, and where should the line be between user sovereignty and platform-level safeguards?

Self-custody wallets should take significant responsibility for protecting users, and I’d push back on the idea that this creates a tension with sovereignty.

The false version of user sovereignty is: “we give you total freedom and total exposure.” That’s not empowering; that’s abandonment. Real sovereignty means users have full control over their assets and real protection against threats they can’t always see.

Our Security Scanner feature has flagged over $458 million directed at malicious contracts, and helped alert users to more than $191 million in suspicious transactions in 2025 alone. Our Address Poisoning Protection, a feature that detects lookalike scam addresses in real-time and alerts users before they send funds, is the latest addition to Trust Wallet’s industry-leading security stack. Users don’t have to understand address poisoning or malicious smart contracts to be protected from them. That’s what we should expect from a wallet.

The line I draw is this: we warn, we protect, we give users the information to make a decision — but we don’t make decisions for them. If a user wants to interact with something our security systems flag as risky, we tell them clearly, and then we respect their choice. Sovereignty with information is the goal. Sovereignty without information isn’t freedom, it’s exposure.

Regulation is becoming clearer in some markets while others remain fragmented or uncertain. How should wallet companies like Trust Wallet navigate the balance between decentralization, compliance, and user access across different jurisdictions?

Regulatory clarity is genuinely good for this industry. Uncertainty can create more problems than it solves; for users, for builders, and for the long-term credibility of crypto.

What’s important to understand is what Trust Wallet is and isn’t. We’re a self-custodial software interface. We don’t hold customer funds, we don’t operate markets, we don’t match orders, and we’re not anyone’s counterparty. That’s a different regulatory conversation than the one centralized exchanges are having.

Our approach is to engage constructively where needed, be transparent about how the product works, and make sure the users have access to the best available services. When regulation creates real clarity, it helps us by setting clear expectations for the industry.

What I’d push back on is regulation as a barrier to access. The populations who benefit most from self-custody — people without access to traditional banking, people in economies with currency instability — are often the least served by fragmented regulatory environments. Good regulation should protect users, not exclude them.

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