This paper presents a wavelet Galerkin scheme for the fast solution of boundary integral equations. Wavelet Galerkin schemes employ appropriate wavelet bases for the discretization of boundary integral operators. This yields quasi-sparse system matrices which can be compressed to O(N_J) relevant matrix entries without compromising the accuracy of the underlying Galerkin scheme. Herein, O(N_J) denotes the number of unknowns. The assembly of the compressed system matrix can be performed in O(N_J) operations. Therefore, we arrive at an algorithm which solves boundary integral equations within optimal complexity. By numerical experiments we provide results which corroborate the theory.