Trust Wallet's New CEO Didn't Attend the Orientation: Ships 5 Products in 48 Hours

Felix Fan took over as CEO of Trust Wallet in February 2026, succeeding Eowyn Chen. Unlike most new executives who spend their first quarter learning where the coffee machine is and what the org chart actually looks like, Fan apparently missed the memo. Trust Wallet dropped the Trade Menu shortly after he arrived. Within 48 hours, four more products followed: swap price impact protection, an updated Trending Page, prediction markets through predict.fun, and 1-click swaps.

"I didn't need months to audit Trust Wallet," Fan 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."

Where Self-Custodial Wallets Dropped the Ball

Fan joined from OKX, where he ran product. He's seen the space from multiple angles, and he doesn't soften his critique of where self-custodial wallets have fallen short—mostly because the problems are so obvious they've practically become furniture.

Speed is first on his list. "When you see a market move, you should be able to act in seconds. Most wallets still make that unnecessarily hard." He's not wrong. In crypto, three extra taps is basically a lifetime.

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 the middle ground with no clear trajectory, like a teenager who's too old for the kids' menu but too young for the adult one.

"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 the crypto equivalent of being ghosted by a product team.

That's less a design gap than a product philosophy gap. The middle tier got skipped, and nobody noticed because everyone was busy adding meme coin widgets.

Trust signals round out his concerns. Users sign transactions they can't fully parse, get exposed to scam contracts without any warning from the app—because apparently the security team was on a different roadmap.

"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." You know, the part where you don't lose all your funds.

The Trade Menu: Why Now

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. Traders have become like dogs hearing a squirrel—instinct kicks in before thought.

Most wallets didn't get that memo. Features are scattered. Execution is buried. The moment of action gets slowed down by the interface like a sports car stuck in a parking garage.

The Trade Menu is the fix, at least the beginning of one. Swap, perpetuals, predictions, trending plays are in one place and only require one tap. Revolutionary concept: put things where users can find them.

"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."

Some of what's coming isn't new territory. Live charts, transparent fee structures—CEX traders have had these for years. Fan acknowledged the point, probably while sighing heavily.

"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."

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. It's like a restaurant that serves food but doesn't own the kitchen, the ingredients, or the chef.

"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 article politely refrains from asking if "new category" is crypto-speak for "we couldn't fit it into existing boxes."

Simple by Default Is Harder Than It Sounds

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—essentially, choosing what to hide from people until they're worthy.

Show too much and you overwhelm. Show too little and power users hit a wall immediately. It's like a TV remote with one button: convenient, but good luck changing the channel.

"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." The eternal struggle between confusing newcomers and offending veterans.

The middle-tier user complicates that. The one who's past basic swapping but not yet doing anything sophisticated. They're basically the Goldilocks of DeFi—not too new, not too degen, just... there.

"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." Translation: we know it's a mess, we're working on it, please don't leave.

On Independence

Fan's push to enhance Trust Wallet comes when CEX-backed wallets have gotten serious. Several now offer real self-custody, deep liquidity behind them, user bases fed directly from their parent exchanges. It's like a fox offering to guard the henhouse, except the fox has really good PR.

He doesn't think that makes the case for self-custodial wallets any harder. If anything, it makes it more important—or as he might put it, the rooster's presence at the henhouse only reinforces why we need guard dogs.

"CEX-backed wallets have a structural ceiling. They will always be optimized—consciously or not—for their parent exchange's liquidity, products, and interests. That's just the reality," Fan said. The article notes he said this without irony, which is either refreshing or optimistic.

"Our only job is to give users the best available prices from decentralized markets, the best experience, and full control over their own assets. We can integrate the best liquidity sources, not just the ones we own. Independence is a feature. And 220 million people have already voted for it." 220 million people who've presumably read the fine print and understood exactly what they were signing up for. One can hope.

The Number Trust Wallet Is Actually Building Toward

Under his leadership, Trust Wallet