Updates

Hi all,

Today, Walt has no funding, no revenue, and no real product. It’s from this place that I hope that this post may claim its authenticity. If Walt ever becomes successful and profitable, it may be harder to convince you (and myself!) that the reasons for building it were not for that end goal.

I believe Walt is good for humanity.

It may seem absurd to say that a wallet app installed on smartphones is an ethical win for all of humanity. I hope to convince you that small acts multiplied across tens of millions of people can have important impacts.

It also may seem like self-promoting propaganda for me to write this, given that I stand to benefit financially if you decide to support Walt. But I hope that I can convince you that I am both self-promoting, but also genuine in that I truly believe what I write here.

I believe the size of the biggest companies in the world are just too big. That, for the time I’ve been alive, the largest companies have grown more powerful, while challengers to these companies grow weaker and fewer. I can be more precise and talk about numbers and the market cap insanity and the squashing of competition. But I think the factual presentation of how I came to conclude this is not that useful and there will be plenty of holes and counterarguments. It’s more realistic to say that I just feel it. And I think a lot of other people feel this way too.

I also believe that “too big” causes some of the most important problems we have to solve in the next few generations. These problems surface themseves in veiled ways far downstream that often these companies don’t intend or even think about when making decisions. For example, political polarization can be dramatically affected by the moderation decisions a single social media company may choose. And that political polarization affects the customer relationships and stability of a coffee shop in a small town in Kansas.

This belief made its way to my own personal life throughout that last 5 years. I moved away from social media, opened up a Proton account, switched to Signal, etc. (Now that I have been building Walt, I know that I was among the hundreds of millions who have been doing the same. We are in good company.)

And then I got to the Google Wallet app on my Fairphone. And when I got there, I realized two things:

1. There is no alternative to this app. You can’t download another wallet app. Consumers have two choices- Google Wallet or Apple Pay.
2. This is an extremely important app to these two companies’ revenue.

The combination of my own ethical values, along with these two points, paints the framework for how I believe Walt is good for humanity. The framework is this:

1. Every single person that chooses to leave Google Wallet and Apple Pay is a small dent in the revenue of these two largest companies in the world.
2. The more people that switch, the greater the impact.
3. Walt will not cause the same levels of problems as these two companies because a) it will not sell or share the users’ data, b) it will just never be that big.

There are hundreds of millions of people who want to leave Google and Apple. By providing Walt as an alternative, it multiplies this very small win across any single person who chooses to switch to Walt.

I’ll finish this post by saying that Walt is also a for profit company, which I think is also an important demonstration of ethical values. Proton, DuckDuckGo, Signal, etc. are proving to the world that there is market demand for companies that value data privacy, and can make good, ethical decisions while still being extremely profitable and sustainable. Demonstrating to the world that consumers are willing to make the switch to these products proves to future entrepreneurs that this endeavor is worth the risk, which will lead to more and more alternatives.

I hope Walt can someday join the ranks of these role models.

This is how it starts.

Coverage Map

Hi everyone,

Walt began as a side project in my personal life. For 4 years, I’ve been degoogling and de-Big-Tech’ing my life. It started with my personal phone- moving WhatsApp => Signal, Drive => Dropbox, Gmail => Proton Mail. My entire Android’s app collection was almost finished with Google until I hit the “W” part in the list, which brought me to Google Wallet.
I couldn’t find a replacement, so I started trying to build it for myself, just to see if I could. Almost two years later, there’s quite the following.

The goals have grown, of course. It’s not just about me anymore.
My vision for Walt is to enable anyone on the planet to be able to pay for stuff without relying on the largest monopolies in the world.

I sometimes write about how Walt, when it launches, will be good for humanity. I believe this in my bones. The concentration of money and power are causing some of the most painful problems in the world. I believe Walt has an opportunity to make a (extremely) small dent in these companies’ revenue by providing an alternative payment mechanism to whoever wants to switch. When tens of millions of people make that choice and move away from Google Wallet and onto Walt, a small but deliberate step will have been taken to decentralize money and power.

Since the beginning, Walt has been all about the in-person tap-to-pay experience with a user’s native bank card. Tomorrow, I will announce an expansion in this vision, with a new Walt product. This new product will enable every European to use Walt, including for the original tap-to-pay product. It also opens the doors to eventually launch in Canada, the US, and Australia (where I get daily emails asking for Walt).

As always, thank you for the support.
Talk to you tomorrow.

Hi everyone!

This past week, Walt has been on a bit of a sidequest, focusing on the current legislation around the digital euro. On June 23, the European Parliament’s ECON committee adopted its position on the digital euro. This could be really important for the future of how we pay in Europe! What’s absolutely clear is that, in a few years, the way money moves from person to person and person to business in Europe will be completely different than it is today.

There are gaps in this legislation though. If we aren’t careful, the potential that the digital euro has will be squandered because we didn’t enable a competitive market to interact with this new currency. If the current text were to be passed, it’s unlikely that Walt (or any other wallet) would be able to tap-to-pay with digital euros.

Walt has sent a proposal for amendments to the ECON’s proposed legislation. Briefly, the aim of the proposal is to:

Give digital euro users the right to access and use their digital euro holdings through any certified user interface of their choice, including one not provided by their own payment service provider.

Here are the full changes that Walt is proposing.

And now, back to building Walt for iOS!

Hey everyone!

I’ve been speaking with investors over the last week (more on this in the next update). Part of the conversation that comes up is: how does Walt plan to release? Once audits are passed and approval granted, what happens? There is a concrete and clear plan for this moment. I’d like to share that plan now.

Phase 1 Release: End of 2026

The hopeful first release of Walt will be at the end of 2026. It will be very limited in who it goes out to. And perhaps to many people’s surprise, the first market I am planning on releasing to is Estonia. There are a few overlapping metrics that lead to Estonia as the first market. One of the strongest reasons though is that the initial release may be rough. For those of you who downloaded and used version 0.1.0 of Walt Lite, you know how rough I mean. I’m expecting many failed taps and support requests in those early days, and limiting the size of the user group will be important. Estonia’s small population is key here. I will use this limited launch to debug issues and understand the types of support that are expected.

And importantly, at the end of 2026, almost all Estonian bank cards will be able to be added to Walt. This is not true for many other countries. Having all issuers onboard means that the user experience will be much easier. Fewer support cases will arise about cards not being able to be added.

That said, the list of agreeable banks is not confirmed yet. There is still a tremendous amount riding on scheme review, audit and approval that is not yet complete. This is also why the Availability Map cannot yet be updated with the list of the specific banks / issuers with cards that can be added to Walt.

Hopeful date: Q4 2026

Market: Estonia

Phase 2 Release: Beginning of 2027

At the beginning of Q1 2027, Walt will make its first full-throttle release. The chosen markets here, Sweden, Austria, Poland, and maybe Norway, are countries where there is already significant demand and excitement. It’s expected that thousands of users will download Walt immediately on release date. This will be an extremely intense moment, and Walt will no longer be just me, as there will be too much activity.

Again, it’s important to note here that a key reason for these chosen countries is that, as of May 2026, I believe that most issuers in these countries will support Walt immediately at release. This means a much happier user, as most of their cards will be able to be added to Walt.

Hopeful date: Q1 2027

Market: Sweden, Austria, Poland, (maybe) Norway

Phase 3 Release: Mid 2027

In the middle of 2027, I hope to release Walt to the real revenue-generating market: Germany. Germany is the gold prize in the EEA because of the population’s extreme focus on data privacy and EU sovereignty. Additionally, Italy, Finland, Spain, and Denmark will be released in this phase. Unlike the phase 1 and phase 2 rollouts, phase 3 has an additional complication: there are significant gaps in issuer coverage for these countries. What this means is that, unless things change significantly from now until mid-2027 (which is unlikely), only about half the cards issued in these countries will be able to be added to Walt.

Hopeful date: Q2/Q3 2027

Market: Germany, Italy, Finland, Spain, Denmark

Phase 4 Release: End of 2027

Lastly, at the end of 2027, Walt will be released to all remaining EEA countries plus some additional stray countries in which some issuers have already approved of Walt. In this phase, which includes two prize markets of the UK and France, there is likely to be significant issuer coverage gaps. In the first days of the release, users will likely experience that most of their cards cannot be added to Walt. I am hopeful that enough issuers will be onboard that at least one card can be added on average for each user, but more work will be needed in these markets, regardless.

Hopeful date: Q4 2027

Market: Rest of EEA + some non-EEA countries that have some issuers onboard.

What about the cards that can’t be onboarded?

As described, in each market there will be cards that can’t be added to Walt in the initial release. This is especially painful to write for France (where there is resistance likely because of the optimism around Wero) and the UK (which just has big, risk-averse banks). Enabling cards for adding to Walt across all of Europe will likely be the most important job for the Walt team for the long-term future. We will continue to try to get Walt accepted by banks, so that Walt users can add all their cards into the Walt app.

Things will change

This is the status and plan today. I’m sharing this plan because this is what I’m telling investors, and it feels like the Walt community should be on the same page. But I am confident that this plan will need minor or major tweaks as release dates approach and new information becomes available. Thank you in advance for having patience as the plan evolves.

Whenever I introduce Walt, I inevitably start talking about one of its core principles of advancing EU sovereignty. And if the person I’m talking to is a potential customer, someone who might want to download Walt and start using it to tap-to-pay, this seems great, but more importantly to most people is that Walt is a private solution, that it doesn’t share or sell (or even centrally store) transaction data. But quite often, I am introducing Walt to bank executives or investors. For these people, EU sovereignty matters a great deal. And to them, they want to understand my relationship to the EU, both personally as the founder, and commercially as the Walt legal entity.

I was born and raised in the US. I moved to Denmark about 8 years ago and have my permanent residency here. But my accent, both when I speak Danish and in English, makes it very clear where I came from.

I think it’s really understandable then, when the stakes are high, for my and Walt’s relationship to Denmark and the EU to be a topic of interest. As the founder and currently only employee, my personal life choices very much dictate the future of the company. In the same level of transparency, I would like to clarify that relationship publicly.

• Walt is a Danish company. Walt will always be a Danish company.
• I live in Denmark. I don’t know where they’ll bury me, but I intend to live the rest of my life in Denmark.
• Walt intends to deliver the first European-wide tap-to-pay solution because Europe is its home.

In many ways, building a company is like raising a child. And perhaps it is that same relationship that I and Walt have to Europe. An American living in Europe created a thing. But because of where and how it was created, it is European, more so than the American that created it ever will be.

Before finishing this update though, I would also like to dismiss any notions that Walt is anti-American. I believe that the principles of Walt are for the betterment of humanity. I believe that no one suffers more from Big Tech and the lack of privacy than Americans do. No one emails me asking for Walt as much as Americans do.

Hi everyone!

It’s one of the most exciting days for Walt. It’s the first day the application will get used by real, legitimate customers. Today, Walt goes live.

I am extremely grateful and humbled to build Walt for this community. Walt is a very small aspirational step toward a world that I believe exists. Welcome to Walt. I hope you all like it.

What’s in this release

• Android only. For now. iOS coming in a couple weeks.
• Passes:
  • Upload loyalty cards, boarding passes, concert tickets, etc.
  • Upload PDFs for any other types of tickets
  • View passes
• Tap-to-pay: Not included
  • Tap-to-pay is the primary feature. But it’s still going through audits.
  • Several months until it goes live

Who should join

• Early adopters. Are you SUPER excited for the eventual general available release of Walt? Please join!
• Familiar with software. Do you have a GitHub account and have time to file bug reports? Please join!
• Graphene and non-standard OS. I have a special eye on how Walt acts for the neglected OS’s. Please join!

Asks

• Expect bugs! This is the first beta release with the limited Passes feature set. (My mom is the only one who’s tested it so far.)
• File bug reports on GitHub.

Download

To download Walt, join the Walt Discord server, where you’ll find the Walt app download link.

Hi everyone!

Once a week for the last 3 months, I find myself in a meeting that is the new most important meeting of Walt’s short life. And this last week topped them all. Walt had its most critical reviews throughout the week in meetings with “the schemes” (they won’t let me officially name them outside of their own press). In each of these meetings I needed to convince the schemes that Walt had a legitimate market, that it was good for the world, and that the new architectural model that Walt relies on for onboarding banks is a sound one. Failing to do so would have been catastrophic. Had either of the schemes rejected Walt, it likely would have been the end of the line.

But the meetings were astounding in their success. Walt now has a solid foundation to move forward with approvals in place.

They did, however, introduce the need to set up internal projects and run additional internal audits against Walt including on the codebase. In the long term, this is good. Walt having an official audit that people trust and that it can present to you all as credibility is a very good thing. But unfortunately, it does mean that my intended Q3 beta release is now delayed to Q4. I also had to prioritize these conversations this month, so contract negotiations with the appropriate partners are still midway. This means I won’t be able to reveal the Availability Map for another month. To me, these feel like small concessions in a much larger successful month. I am terrifically happy with getting these checkmarks behind me.

In other news, more people continue to discover Walt and post about it on Reddit (examples here and here). I also wrote to the community about my own experience building Walt so far and the untested market that it is entering. With all this Reddit activity, the waitlist has skyrocketed. The community is extremely curious and excited.

So I’d like to try an experiment this week. On Thursday, Apr. 23 at 16.00 CET, I’ll be hosting Walt Office Hours. Find the link to the Proton Meeting here. If you have any questions about Walt, please join at any point between 16.00 and 16.30 CET. Examples of questions you might be curious about: “Will Walt work on Graphene?”, “Why are you charging people for Walt?”, “What target markets will be first to launch?” etc. I also think it’s important to introduce myself to anyone who would like to meet me. In the end, Walt will be a wallet that your card details must be typed into. Being accessible to the humans on the other side of the app, I hope, will help us establish some trust.

Hi everyone!

Walt’s waitlist is now several thousand people. That’s wild. What a ride it’s been so far and it’s only just beginning. I expect that a year from now, the active user count on Walt is going to be 100 times today’s waitlist, the people supporting the product and users will be a fully fledged Walt team, and the giants that we are fighting will know our name.

It’s a good time, I think, to introduce myself.

My name is Cole. I’m originally from the US, a farm in Kansas specifically although the most common animals on the farm were the packs of raccoons. I moved to Denmark about 7 years ago and am madly in love with Copenhagen. It’s small and humble and it’s aspirations are inline with the way I wish the world would move. I hope to soon be a Danish citizen. In school, I specialized in mechanical engineering, doing stints at oil refiners and Exxon (wow, how things change). But most of my career is in software in fintech companies like Funding Circle and Pleo.

I’ve built small things that I never dreamed of taking to market. And that’s largely how Walt started. I just intended to build a replacement to Google Wallet for myself to use.

I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to build for you all. Thank you all for supporting Walt so far, even if by just lending your email to the waitlist.

Hi everyone!

Riding the Walt entrepreneurship tide is a crazy experience. For the most part, these highs are the biggest of my career. The lows are also rough! But things are going extremely well- so well that it feels a bit blinding in a way. What potential dangers lurk on the outskirts, that can’t be seen yet.

First, some updates on the go-to-market progress.

As an engineer, I didn’t really know what go-to-market meant. This was obvious in the early days of Walt. I had a fully functional app downloaded on my phone before I even thought about revenue! I was just building for me, and thinking there might be some other people like me out there with my needs.

So it was pretty shellshocking when, on day 1 at Copenhagen Fintech’s incubation program, the mentorship team broke my brain by saying my pitch deck was just basically slides about how cool and simple the app was. It was one of those moments that founders talk about where I had to kill my darlings and admit that I actually had no idea how to build a business.

I, and Walt, have grown up a bit.

For the last month, all of my focus has been on understanding the players in the area, blockers, potential partnerships, etc. It’s been a completely new language, but a fun one. I can say that it has been absolutely exhilarating to be in potential partnership calls, pitching Walt to banking infrastructure providers, or to Visa, and finding that the world is genuinely interested in this. And what’s more, this has created unexpected traction and interest.

I decided from the beginning that Walt was built for humans. Walt is a B2C product, where the C’s are the entire motivation. The C’s are the people like me, who want a thing to exist that doesn’t exist. Once I’ve built the thing to the needs of the C’s, stop building. That’s the simplicity of the product- enable tap-to-pay with your phone anywhere in the world, with the same user experience that people are used to with Google Wallet. No crypto, no AI, no bloated feature set or premium subscription model.

Initially, our target was Android- build the app that helps people save their data where data needs saving most. As a C myself, I have personally not thought about Apple too much. I’m more satisfied with how they treat our data with respect.

But the more I talked to banks, payment infrastructure companies, the networks, and processors, the more I realized that Apple is doing some shady stuff too. Apple has always been famous in software developer world for being “difficult”, but I never bothered to dive deeply into how. In understanding the market, I get it now.

The most important discovery is that, whenever someone uses Apple Pay, Apple charges the customer’s bank. And given that there were €700B in tap-to-pay transactions in Europe last year, this took a toll on our banks (who eventually must pass this expense on to customers). European banks paid €500M to Apple last year. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t do this at all. Using Google Wallet is free to the issuing banks. This is a uniquely Apple fee. Moreover, now that the engineering is largely complete for the Walt Android application, I can say that this is not complicated technology. NFC technology like Apple Pay and Google Wallet is not rocket science.

At a time when BuyFromEU is becoming a major theme across all member states, we realized we needed to reclaim the respect we deserve from Apple, on behalf of our European banks.

I never thought I would be writing that I’m fighting for the rights of banks. But here we are.

What this means is that Walt is no longer just an Android application. Over the last month, on the side and in evenings, I’ve started and now finished a complete iOS application. I’m also evaluating the validity and the market for a Linux or Graphene based Walt app.

And with it comes Walt’s new mission-
Walt will reclaim tap-to-pay for Europe.

Hi everyone!

What an exciting update!

Today turns the page for Walt. For the last year, the founding team has been using their evenings and weekends working on Walt, building architecture and ensuring the core values of Walt’s privacy-first ethics are baked into the product. That was enormously successful, and the proof-of-concept that the team initially created is now alive in a beta offering in the Google Play store.

But today, something new begins - The team begins a 2 month, full-time intensive program at the Copenhagen Fintech incubator program!

The program goes through a thorough deep dive into all facets of the Walt offering. Branding, legal, engineering, marketing. All aspects of the company and the product will be analyzed and polished. This is TREMENDOUS news because, up until now, Walt has been entirely focused on the engineering side and making sure that the privacy goals were legitimately possible. Having some critical analysis on the branding, for instance, will likely yield some huge (and embarrassing) improvements. (For those of you who have noticed how amateur our design skills are, thank you for sticking around despite this). The team will be pitching Walt to some of the largest investors in Denmark and more importantly, to the largest banks in the Nordics. And while Walt’s aspirations are very much beyond just a product for the Nordics, starting locally and using Denmark as a testing ground is perfect, as 85% of in-store transactions in the Nordic region are with tap-to-pay. You can check out how we frame Walt to banks (and why banks also benefit from Walt’s success) in our pitch deck.

And more importantly, this is a mindset shift. Walt is no longer a hobby project that we’ve been building in our basement. While it’s true that’s how it started, it’s very clear from customer conversations, inbound investor messages, and the subscription waitlist that Walt has touched on a problem that has very solid grounding with people right now. For me, this means that I can no longer act like I have one foot in, one foot out. The commitment to working full time, without pay, on Walt means that I must take the problem and the potential customers of Walt seriously.

Things keep on keeping on!

January and February were HUGE months for Walt on an engineering side. Some of the biggest hurdles that Walt’s vision aimed for were within the engineering, and these challenges were successfully overcome. Now, Walt is moving into a different phase. Here are a couple updates on where we’re at!

Copenhagen Fintech

Walt and I have accepted an invitation from Copenhagen Fintech’s incubation program. This is an absolutely huge step for Walt! Copenhagen Fintech is the premier fintech accelerator in the Nordics and the most well-connected to banks and issuers, whom are the keys to accomplishing Walt’s vision. Getting warm introductions to issuers is the biggest need (even beyond funding) that Walt has right now.

Additionally, accelerator programs like Copenhagen Fintech focus on companies with hopes to become extremely profitable and make big investment requests. Walt does not fit this profile. Walt deliberately focuses on modesty and limited features. Additionally, and in contrast to the other companies in the cohort, Walt has no AI focus. Lastly, the founding team intends to ask for as little investment as possible if that need someday arises.

The fact that Copenhagen Fintech has accepted us into their incubation program despite these big differences from their standard acceptees is an extremely good sign.

Full-Time Focus

Accepting the invitation also comes with the need to devote more time and intention to overcoming the current hurdles Walt must overcome. That means that I (Cole) am moving to work full-time on Walt. This change is something that has been planned for months, and it’s very exciting!

Working on Walt has been incredibly exciting and fun so far. Most of the focus has been on something I was already well-versed in - the engineering build. But now that the proof-of-concept for building a completely private, compliant, tap-to-pay alternative to Google Wallet is complete, the challenges require me to develop new skills. The full-time move is a welcome change.

Hello Walt supporters!

What a 6 months it has been! The team hasn’t really left our computers since the company was formed! We’ve been (very) hard at work building. We’ve focused primarily on the engineering side so far, building out the secure, completely private Android wallet application.

And it’s gone SO GREAT!!! Besides the tremendous success of the engineering build, it’s also been the joy of a lifetime to build something that we really believe in, and that we truly believe benefits real humans. And that joy and passion has really come through in the way the application looks and feels.

Request for Intros!

But now that the engineering is largely completed, now begins the hard part - the partnerships phase.

Before Walt can be used by actual humans, “issuers” like banks and neo-banks have to approve Walt to be an acceptable app for their bank card to be loaded into. This sounds like a small task! They just need to click “OK” on their acceptance screen!

But it was well known before starting that this is the most difficult task for Walt and the team. Right now, most issuers across the globe have a list of just 2 accepted apps for their cards to be loaded into - Apple Pay and Google Wallet (and sometimes Samsung Pay, and very rarely Garmin Pay).

We’re making tremendous progress. We have very strong starts with two small issuers with relationships to the team. But we’ll need many, many more issuers to accept Walt if we’re ever going to allow the general population to begin using Walt.

So this is where we need your help, friendly supporters. If you have any personal connections with any issuers (e.g. a bank or fintech neo-bank), the team at Walt would love any warm intros.

Coming Up Next

We continue to update our roadmap on the walt.is website. The immediate next steps are to focus on onboarding our first issuer and then to test the end-to-end flow of add card → insert card details → start using tap-to-pay with Walt.

But beyond that, we have an exciting engineering update as well, that we’ll share soon!