Splitting Bills With Crypto Bros Got Easier With WeSplit

Recorded at Solana Breakpoint 2025, day three.

Hodl Up: Good morning! We're at Breakpoint day three, and this morning we have Pauline from WeSplit joining us for a conversation. Welcome.

Pauline: Nice to meet you. Thank you for inviting me.

Hodl Up: It's a pleasure. This is all about spotlighting builders, and you're actually one of the youngest builders we've met here, which is amazing. We love what you've been doing and we want to know all about it. But first, give us a brief introduction: what you do, how you got into crypto, and how you transitioned into this industry in the first place.

Pauline: Definitely. Hi, I'm Pauline. I'm the founder of WeSplit, but more importantly, I'm still a student in France. I'm a UX/UI designer, so that's pretty interesting. I learned about crypto about five years ago, before the big crash, and basically learned what Solana was and what crypto was. I did a little bit of trading, but I wasn't really good at it. I haven't made my first million yet. So I kept building, learned how to develop, and built one project after another.

Hodl Up: All right. As far as I know, you have two projects, and this is the second one you founded. Before we get into what you're building right now: why did you choose to build on Solana? I know it's Breakpoint and we'll talk about Solana one way or another, but why?

Pauline: When I first entered the crypto space, I was just looking around at Ethereum, Bitcoin and all the big names you hear about. And I saw Solana. I saw the community: when you asked a question, people answered you, and that wasn't the case in every community I went into. Solana was also the most affordable blockchain I'd heard of, and it was very accessible for young people. They're doing a very good job of educating students and bringing them in. I'm here thanks to their student sponsorship, which is amazing. So I learned a little bit about it: the speed, and the whole community helping each other. I think that's what made me choose Solana.

Hodl Up: It's the place to be at this point. Where else would you choose to build, right? Cardano? But now tell us a little bit about WeSplit. I know it's pretty useful, especially for me and my friends, because we always get into fights when we travel about who's paying what and how we split the expenses. Tell us about it, and how the blockchain makes it more efficient than traditional competitors.

Pauline: Definitely. We started WeSplit about one month ago. The idea was that we wanted to share expenses with our friends. As you know, crypto nomads move everywhere in the world. There are events everywhere. You go to a restaurant or a bar to meet people, and most of them pay with crypto, with KAST, Solflare, Crypto.com and so on. It was always a nightmare when someone said, "Okay, I paid in USDC, I want you to reimburse me in USDC," or in SOL. One of my friends, I won't say his name, was very new to crypto, and he said, "Wait, I don't know how to send crypto to a wallet. If I make an error, what do I do?" We learned from him that it was quite complicated for people outside the space or very new to it. And even for crypto natives, when someone says, "Okay, I paid for everyone and I need you to reimburse me," it's a nightmare. So we decided to build an application that's like a social layer for group finance. It's not only splitting with your friends; there's also the friends layer, the social part: you can connect with people and share which communities you're part of, and we wanted to gamify the whole experience.

As for why blockchain: we know there's Tricount, there's Splitwise, there's everything. But they're made to pay with your bank account, in fiat. When you add the blockchain layer, when you pay in USDC or SOL, it's complicated to track, and there are so many errors. It's a nightmare. So we wanted to make a version of this for crypto, adding the speed, the transparency and the tracking that blockchain has.

Hodl Up: The whole mission of the project is really valid. I've been in this industry for five years and use crypto daily, and I still make mistakes sometimes when I'm sending crypto to different wallets, because there are too many blockchains, too many L2s, even L3s nowadays, and too many stablecoins. So I respect that. What's next for WeSplit? You already have a solid project, a solid concept and a clear mission, and I think you're in public beta right now. What should we expect?

Pauline: There are so many great things coming right now. With the public beta in your hands, you can already split with your friends at a restaurant, a bar or an event when it's a one-off split: you scan your bill and split it with your friends. What we really want to improve with WeSplit is shared finance. You create a shared wallet and invite friends, if you go on a trip, or even for DAOs or startups. You can add rules for who can withdraw and who can top up the wallet, all linked to a WeSplit crypto card. That would be amazing, but we know it's quite expensive and legally complicated. So for now we're partnering with different providers, Solflare soon I hope, maybe KAST, so you can link your crypto cards to WeSplit and use them for every expense. That's one thing. But the big thing we're trying to do, since splitting is meant to be social, is create Split Nights: events every month where people can come and split everything together using WeSplit. We want to partner with different people in the ecosystem, in France at first because that's where we're based, but we hope to do something at the next Breakpoint.

Hodl Up: The whole idea makes sense. People say you don't need blockchain for everything, but I always say that as soon as money is involved, you should involve blockchain. I like that you use multisig, so basically you can't make a transaction without the whole group confirming. Is that correct? That's super nice. Now, I know you're part of Superteam France. I love everything about Superteam. I love nothing about France. So I wanted to ask whether you've encountered barriers building this since you're based there. I love France as a historically and culturally rich place, but crypto-wise I think they're regressing in many respects, especially on taxes. I only know two companies off the top of my head that are based in France: Ledger and WeSplit. We don't have Ledger with us, so I want to hear from you.

Pauline: Definitely. Living in France is good. Building in France is a nightmare. You have taxes for everything, not only for crypto. We're building something, and we know we'll have so much tax to pay. Then they say, "Hey, you know the flat tax? We'll put it at 20%, then 30%, then 40%." I think it's 37% right now, to be honest. When you're trying to build something you just started and they want to tax everything you do, it's very complicated. As a startup you lose so much money to them. Then you have regulation. France is in Europe, and Europe just launched MiCA. You used to be able to build something, innovate and say, "Okay, if my product works, I can get regulated later." Now, if you want to start your product, you need to be regulated, and it's very expensive. Getting the license is a nightmare. Last time I checked, maybe a month ago, France had not given a MiCA license to anyone in France, so you need to go to another country to get it.

Hodl Up: And now they want to get rid of passporting as well, because people were getting MiCA licenses in countries where they were easier to obtain and then operating in France, for example. Now they want to remove that. It's a nightmare. Going back to WeSplit: you mentioned that one of the reasons you started was that friends made errors when making crypto payments or transfers. I love that you're making the user interface and user experience very simple, but I can't help thinking that if you make it too simple, there will be trade-offs at some level. Since you're still in public beta, have you seen trade-offs that might have been avoided if it were more dev-themed, if you know what I mean?

Pauline: When we started, we put a big focus on UX/UI. I'm a UX/UI designer, so of course when I work on a project I want it to be simple and beautiful. But when we started WeSplit, we made things so simple that people were lost. For example, we share your seed phrase with you so you can recover your wallet if you lose your phone. But we hid it, because we thought, okay, if someone comes to WeSplit and doesn't know anything about crypto, telling them "Hey, save your 12 or 24 words" will be complicated. They'll be like, "What is this? What do you mean I need to save it because I could lose my phone?" So we hid it a little bit. You had access to it, but it wasn't displayed when you connected. Some people said, "For me that's a loss of security. I don't feel secure using WeSplit." So we're managing as best we can between crypto natives, who want certain features to be visible every time they come to an app, and people coming from the Web2 ecosystem, who just want to know how to use the application without learning a whole dictionary of Web3 words. We're trying to do the best of both worlds, but our main goal is really to be a bridge for people from Web2 to Web3. When you're splitting with your friends, not everyone is crypto-native. Some will know the big words, crypto, Bitcoin and so on, but they don't really know what they are, and if they want to split with you, it will be difficult for them.

Hodl Up: Now I want to go back to you as a founder. As Dren said, you're one of the youngest founders we've had on the podcast, probably the youngest. Can you tell us a bit more about the journey of your previous project, and then about the challenges a founder like you faces, especially in Europe, but also in general when building in crypto nowadays? Many aspiring founders will probably be watching this episode, so the floor is yours.

Pauline: It's not only my journey. I've built the last two projects with the same people. In our first year of university I met my developer, Vincent. We were building things for clients in the Web2 ecosystem, and at one point, maybe in our second year, I said, "I'd love to go do some innovation in the Web3 ecosystem. Do you want to come with me?" We were developers, but very Web2 and very junior, so it was complicated. He said, "Okay, let me learn what a smart contract is and what blockchain is, and I'll come with you." We started a dApp builder project on Solana. It was nice and we learned many things. We also learned that building an app from scratch with only two people, when it's your first project and your first smart contract, is a nightmare. But we learned a lot. We participated in the previous Colosseum hackathon, I think it was Radar or Breakout, I don't remember which one. We didn't win, of course, but it was cool because we met so many people. We knew that project wasn't going to be our million-dollar project, but we kept building because we were meeting great people, networking and learning so much about blockchain development. Then at one point a friend of ours threw a barbecue in France. You love to have barbecues with your friends, it's like an apéro. It was a 500 barbecue, something like that, and he wanted to be reimbursed. That's when the WeSplit idea came up. I met him yesterday, and he said, "Nobody reimbursed me. I think I lost about 300 on that." We encounter that on a daily basis.

Hodl Up: When we ask these questions, we usually want insights from a user's standpoint, but also on what an investor might want to hear. So now I'm going to ask a Shark Tank question: what's the revenue model for WeSplit? How do you generate revenue? Are there fees, for example, on the group finance side?

Pauline: We take fees on transactions when you use WeSplit, from one user to another. These are very low fees. When you go outside the WeSplit ecosystem, we take higher fees. The other thing we're trying to build, because we know fees on transactions are an easy business model but it's hard to make a lot of revenue with them, is premium features. We don't want subscriptions and things like that. But if you want to buy, say, another game to split with your friends, or more features for your social profile, you can just buy them. We're looking into doing that with some partners. Do you know Discord?

Hodl Up: Of course.

Pauline: Like the shop in Discord where you personalize your profile.

Hodl Up: All right. I asked you why Solana, but are you thinking of going multi-chain? LayerZero, I think, does these kinds of protocols.

Pauline: We definitely want to be cross-chain. We started with Solana because it was the best place for us to be supported and to have customers, since there aren't a lot of customers on every blockchain. But since we only use stablecoins like USDC, we want to use Circle to bridge USDC from Solana to Ethereum and elsewhere. So if you're friends with people who aren't in the Solana ecosystem, which I know is a shame, sorry, they can still split with you. You're not limited to splitting only with people in the Solana ecosystem.

Hodl Up: You know what I would do? I would increase the fees for everyone who's not on Solana.

Pauline: Oh yeah, amazing. A new revenue stream.

Hodl Up: All right, to wrap it up, one last question: what can we expect from WeSplit in 2026?

Pauline: Honestly, we're working really hard on WeSplit. We want to be live on iOS, Android and the Seeker, not just in public beta, but really live, and do more things with the ecosystem, like the Split Nights I mentioned. And we'll keep building WeSplit: we have the shared wallet, and the crypto card we want to make. We also want to add features that let you split not only bills but also real-world assets. Say you want to split an NFT to join a community with your friends. That's quite hard for some communities because the price is really high, so you can split it with your friends and share the benefits afterwards. That's something we want to add.

Hodl Up: From what I understand, this was one of your first interviews in crypto, right? We have the conviction that WeSplit is going to make it big, and when it does, don't forget us.

Pauline: I'll come back when it does. If it becomes the million-dollar project, I'll definitely come back.

Hodl Up: Perfect. Well, thank you for joining us today, Pauline. It was a pleasure to have you, and it was a very insightful conversation.

Pauline: Thank you for having me. It was amazing. If our listeners want to test WeSplit, you have all our links there. Just come and test it. We'd love to see you all on it.

Hodl Up: We have to, because we're going to use it daily now. Thank you so much for having us.