Trust Wallet Ceo Felix Fan On Building A Crypto Wallet That Keeps Up With The Market

What Happened

And then trust signals, which Fan frames as a responsibility the wallet itself should carry. Users sign transactions they can’t fully parse, get exposed to scam contracts without any warning from the app. “The wallet should be a layer of protection,” he said. “That’s an area the whole industry has under-invested in, and it’s something we’re taking seriously — being the most secure wallet is a core part of our identity.”

Market Context

Trust Wallet shipped the Trade Menu shortly after he arrived. Within 48 hours, four more products followed, including swap price impact protection, an updated Trending Page, prediction markets through predict.fun, and 1-click swaps.

Speed is the first thing he names. “When you see a market move, you should be able to act in seconds. Most wallets still make that unnecessarily hard,” he said.

Something shifted in how people trade crypto. They don’t sit down and decide between swapping and perps. They see a market move and want in. The decision is intent-based, not product-based. Most wallets didn’t get that memo. Features are scattered. Execution is buried. The moment of action gets slowed down by the interface.

Why It Matters

Some of what’s coming on the roadmap isn’t new territory. Live charts, transparent fee structures — CEX traders have had these for years. Fan said as much. “Fair challenge. Yes, some of what’s coming are things CEX users expect as baseline. We should have had them. We’re fixing that. But that’s the foundation, not the destination.”

“Simple by Default” Might Be Harder Than It Sounds

“The hardest part is entry points,” Fan explained. “Every extra option you surface adds cognitive load. Every option you hide risks frustrating a power user.”

Details

In February 2026, Felix Fan took over as CEO of Trust Wallet, succeeding Eowyn Chen. More often than not, a new CEO spends months getting to know the company, but Fan started by shipping new features to significantly improve the user experience for Trust Wallet’s 220 million users.

“I didn’t need months to audit Trust Wallet,” he told BeInCrypto. “I came in with a clear point of view, and the team had already been doing the hard work. My job was to accelerate innovation, not hesitate.”

What’s less obvious is why Fan sees this moment as urgent, and what he thinks Trust Wallet is actually becoming.

He Thinks the Category Has Missed a Few Things

Fan came to Trust Wallet from OKX, where he ran product. He’s seen the space from multiple angles, and when asked where self-custodial wallets have fallen short, he doesn’t hedge.

Then there’s the user nobody built for. People who’ve done a few trades and want to go deeper, not beginners, not power users, just somewhere in the middle with no clear trajectory.

“The industry obsesses over first-timers and power users,” Fan noted. “The people who’ve done a few trades and want to go deeper? They’re largely underserved. There’s no natural progression.” That’s less a design gap than a product philosophy gap. The middle tier got skipped.

Why the Trade Menu, Why Now

The Trade Menu is the fix for that, at least the beginning of one. Swap, perpetuals, predictions, trending plays are in one place and only require one tap.

“That friction has a real cost,” Fan said. “The Trade Menu removes it. One entry point for everything. That’s not a small UX tweak — that’s a statement about what kind of wallet we’re building. A command center for decentralized finance, not just a balance checker.”

The destination is harder to categorize. Fan describes a wallet where users broadcast intent and the network handles execution — self-custodial by default, cross-chain natively, not routed through any centralized order book.

“That’s not a CEX or a DEX. That’s a new category,” he said. “The Trade Menu is the first step toward that.”

The principle running through the product is “simple by default, advanced by choice.” Fan doesn’t dress it up.

What does the user see first? That’s the decision everything comes back to. Show too much and you overwhelm. Show too little and power users hit a wall immediately.

With the Trade Menu, the call was to optimize for the moment of intent — clean default view, advanced controls there when you want them. The middle-tier user complicates that. The one who’s past basic swapping but not yet doing anything sophisticated.

“We have to earn their trust gradually and give them more as they’re ready,” Fan said. “That’s a sequencing challenge as much as a design one. We’re not perfect at it yet. But that’s exactly the kind of thing we’ll keep iterating on.”

On Independence