Beyond storage: How Trust Wallet’s new CEO is redefining the wallet around trading

For a long time, self-custodial wallets were built for “hold token, swap token.” Today’s Web3 demands more.

With 220 million users, Trust Wallet is already one of the most widely used self-custody products in crypto. But Felix Fan didn’t join as CEO to maintain the status quo. His vision is a wallet that trades perps, runs AI agents, and eventually makes it unnecessary to open any other crypto app.

We spoke with Felix to find out how he plans to get there.

You joined Trust Wallet as CEO in February 2026 with a clear trading vision for wallets. What are some core problems you came in to solve?

Most self-custody wallets were initially built as storage products; somewhere you hold tokens and swap them from. But over the past few years, that's changed significantly and wallets are no longer treating trading as an afterthought. Trading is becoming the primary activity for most crypto-native users. Swaps, perps, prediction markets — that's what people actually do every day. And yet doing those things inside of a wallet has been fragmented: multiple screens, confusing routing, no fiat reference point, no access to the markets people want.

I came in to close that gap. Trust Wallet already had the strongest self-custody foundation in the industry. What it needed was a product layer that matched the speed and depth traders expect, without asking them to leave the wallet or give up custody.

Building trading experiences that match the speed and depth traders expect, inside a self-custody environment. That's the core problem.

You come from a product background at OKX, and two companies you co-founded. How does that shape the way you think about leading Trust Wallet differently?

Building companies from scratch teaches you to prioritise ruthlessly, and stay close to what users actually do. Working at scale at OKX taught me what execution looks like when millions of dollars flow through your product every hour; you develop a deep respect for performance and the cost of getting details wrong.

At Trust Wallet, I try to combine both. We may not appear as a startup because we have real scale, but I want us to move with startup speed on the decisions that matter most. Fewer features shipped better, not more features shipped faster. The swap flow, the trading experience, the on-chain infrastructure — those get disproportionate attention because they're what users interact with every session.

This forces better product thinking. You have to make the experience so good that users never feel the complexity underneath.

Trust Wallet has 220 million global users. At that scale, what does it take to meaningfully improve UX, and where do you start?

You start with the flows people will use most:  swaps and trading. If someone opens Trust Wallet five times a day, four of those are probably to check a price or make a trade. So the swap experience has to be best-in-class. Not just functional, but fast, clear, and confidence-building.

At our scale, you also can't assume a single user profile. We have DeFi power users running complex strategies across multiple chains, and we have people in emerging markets buying their first crypto. The UX has to work for both; i.e. simple by default, powerful when you need it.

The other thing that changes at scale is that small friction compounds. A swap flow that takes one extra tap costs millions of unnecessary taps per day. So we obsess over removing steps and reducing cognitive load. The recent swap redesign came directly from watching where users paused, dropped off, or made errors in the old flow.

You recently overhauled the swap experience with one screen, fiat input, and real-time popular tokens. What did the old flow tell you about where crypto wallets have been getting UX wrong?

Wallets have been designed around how blockchains work, not how people think. The typical swap screen shows two token selectors, an amount in the token you're selling, a slippage setting, and a gas estimate in a native token you might not hold. That's five concepts a user has to hold simultaneously! And none of them map to how people actually think about money.

Additionally, people want to know what's moving right now, so we surface real-time popular tokens. And people don't want to navigate away from what they're doing, so we collapsed the entire flow into one screen.

The broader lesson: crypto wallets have been shipping for extremely crypto-literate users and then wondering why mainstream adoption stalls. Users don't care about chains, gas, and routing. They care about: what am I buying, how much does it cost, and does it work?

Hyperliquid is now live inside Trust Wallet, giving users access to 200+ perp markets without leaving the app. Why is bringing perps natively into a self-custody wallet the right move, and why now?

Perps are where the volume is and the perps market dwarfs spot; it's the primary instrument for active traders. But the experience has been split: trade perps on a CEX and accept custodial risk, or use a DEX perp platform disconnected from the rest of your portfolio.

Trust Wallet now gives users access to Hyperliquid's 200+ perp markets with deep liquidity, without leaving the wallet and without giving up custody.

And we've gone further; users can now also access Hyperliquid's HIP-4 outcome contracts (prediction markets) through Trust Wallet as well. These are contracts priced between $0 and $1 that settle based on real-world outcomes — binary yes/no markets and multi-outcome markets like daily BTC price ranges. No separate account, no separate funding, everything is managed from your existing wallet.

Users can also access Aster alongside Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid for RWAs, U.S. and Korean market exposure, and deeper liquidity; Aster for Hong Kong markets, Chinese meme markets, and higher leverage. One wallet, best of both worlds.

Of course, perpetual contracts are leveraged instruments and carry significant risk — that's why we ensure users have clear disclosures and controls before they trade. And availability varies by jurisdiction; we work within local regulatory frameworks.

Another recent release, the Trust Wallet AgentKit, lets AI agents execute real transactions across 25+ chains within rules users define. What does agentic crypto actually look like for an everyday user in practice?

Think of it like giving a very capable assistant a company card. You set the rules upfront — a daily spending limit, recurring buys on a schedule, or orders that only fire when a price hits your target — and the agent runs those automatically, exactly as you set them, no clicking required. Anything outside those preset rules comes back to you to approve first. You stay in control the whole time.

The real difference between this and a traditional bot comes down to judgment. A bot follows a fixed instruction and breaks the moment reality gets messier than the rule. An agent reasons about context: it reads changing conditions and decides what to do within the boundaries you've set.

The piece that matters most is that Trust Wallet AgentKit is non-custodial. You never hand your keys to a platform. The agent acts with your permission, but the keys stay on your device the entire time — your funds don't move until a transaction actually settles on-chain. Your keys, your agent.

The first wave of use cases will come from developers and power users, but the infrastructure we're building now — non-custodial agent wallets, policy-based controls, open standards compatibility — is what eventually turns agentic crypto from a developer tool into something an everyday user just switches on, as simple as toggling a setting.

What does Trust Wallet look like in three years? Is it still a wallet, or will it become something else entirely?

It's still a wallet, but the definition of "wallet" will have expanded. Today, people think of a crypto wallet as the place you store and swap tokens. In three years, a wallet will be the primary interface for how people interact with the on-chain economy — trading, earning, paying, lending, and delegating to AI agents that act on their behalf.

We're already moving there. Perps, prediction markets, agent wallets, none of these fit the old definition of "wallet," but they all belong here because they're all things a user wants to do with their assets, from one place, without giving up custody.

To get there, Trust Wallet has to be the app that makes it unnecessary to use anything else in crypto. Because the experience is so complete there's no reason to. Best-in-class trading. Seamless DeFi. AI agents handling the complexity you don't want to navigate. All secured by the same self-custody foundation we've built for millions of users.

The word "wallet" might undersell it. But the best products don't need a new category name, they just redefine the one they're in.