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 which yields quasi-sparse system matrices. These matrices can be compressed such that the complexity for solving a boundary integral equation scales linearly with the number of unknowns without compromising the accuracy of the underlying Galerkin scheme. Based on the wavelet Galerkin scheme we present also an adaptive algorithm. By numerical experiments we provide results which demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.