Yana Mar: Small Wallets Need In-App Swaps to Generate Revenue

When a user opens a small crypto wallet and cannot locate the swap feature, they typically close it and complete the trade on a different platform, taking the fee with them.

At TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Yana Mar, Head of B2B and Partnerships at ChangeNOW, called that scenario damaging for both the user experience and the wallet's ability to keep users. The individual remains a wallet customer, but the swap fee is lost.

“The community itself doesn’t pay,” she said.

What Happens to the Fee When a User Departs to Execute a Swap?

Mar began by distinguishing between users who simply store assets and those who transact. According to her, storage by itself generates no income for the wallet.

“If users need to swap and they don’t see this feature inside of the wallet, they go somewhere else and the fee goes somewhere else,” she said.

She argued that a wallet aiming to generate revenue from its community ought to provide swaps, buy/sell functionality, staking, and trading. By retaining those activities within the application, it encourages users to remain and boosts in-app engagement.

Infrastructure expenses also exert pressure. Mar noted that the expense of developing and upkeeping such infrastructure is most burdensome for small wallets.

She advised small teams to avoid building from scratch and instead integrate pre-built solutions for fiat, swaps, and staking.

How Can a Small Wallet Compete When Major Wallets Provide Everything?

The largest wallet providers now cover everything from stablecoin spending to tokenized stock trading, giving smaller teams a limited opportunity. Mar's response was to choose a single focus.

“They should think of something specific, like a specific audience or specific region,” Mar said.

She gave five ways a small wallet can stand out:

• A specific region: A regional approach might involve integrating local payment methods and a support team based in that area.
• A specific audience: Targeting a particular audience is exemplified by Dreamster, a ChangeNOW Fast Track participant aimed at music lovers. Users purchase Digital Music Assets, receive shares in individual songs, and play them within the wallet. Shares can be sold back at any time.
• A specific promise: One partner has centered its offering on security, a strategy Mar noted stands out amid the hacks occurring across the industry.
• Speed: A small team can deploy features within a week that would require months or quarters for a large wallet.
• Quality: As a product scales, user experience can decline, an issue small teams can sidestep.

Zero-Fee Swaps: Why Small Wallet Users Should Not Pursue Them

Some major wallets have eliminated their own fee on particular stablecoin swaps, a step that small wallets cannot readily replicate.

Mar advised examining the offer in more detail. It covers only a restricted set of networks and coins. Only the wallet's own fee is removed; the network fee remains, and cross-chain swaps are excluded.

“It’s not the main revenue stream of the big wallet itself, so they could just afford it,” she said.

She contended that a small wallet does not need to match that offer to maintain audience engagement. Instead, it can differentiate through user experience, such as cross-chain swaps and support for assets that large wallets handle poorly or do not list.

She also wondered whether the label outweighs the outcome. From a user's standpoint, she said, the key factor is what ends up in the wallet, not the fee.

“Users actually care about what lands in the wallet instead of a zero-fee label,” she added.

At ChangeNOW, she said, 98% of swaps land within about 0.5% slippage.

Delegating In-Wallet Support

When a wallet depends on built-in exchange services, support becomes crucial. After those features are activated, it raises the question of who manages user problems when a transaction fails.

Mar outlined a clear division. The exchange provider must resolve transaction issues, she stated, since delivering quality service is its responsibility. The wallet manages the relationship with the user.

In ChangeNOW's process, a partner provides the transaction ID, and ChangeNOW investigates the issue. This applies even if the user triggered the problem by depositing on the wrong network, using the incorrect coin, or omitting a memo.

“User comes to the wallet support team, support team of the wallet comes to us, we help to solve the problem,” she said.

How to Generate Revenue from the Start

In March, ChangeNOW introduced its Free Fast Track program targeting new and early-stage wallets. Mar described it as assistance with the two factors those wallets seek: traffic and profit.

Participants integrate ChangeNOW's exchange API and begin earning from swaps immediately upon launch. Each user swap provides the partner with a revenue share starting at 0.4%.

ChangeNOW also provides marketing assistance, including cross-promotion, press releases, podcasts, and a presence at TOKEN2049.

“They just need the audience and the engagement to get the profit,” Mar said.

What Wallet Teams Should Cease and What They Should Pursue

Mar's initial recommendation for wallet teams was to prioritize security. She stated that the industry had incurred approximately $1 billion in hack losses over the past six months, and that the fear of hacks and scams has consistently been a barrier to mass adoption.

Her estimate falls below some recent tallies. According to PeckShield data, September losses alone reached $766.49 million, with the Bitget incident representing about $387 million of that amount.

“It’s important to provide the product that people will trust. You cannot just ignore that,” she said.

Her second directive was to continue adding features and products, as most wallets now include buy, sell, and staking. She argued that differentiation comes from listening to user needs, even if a request does not initially seem suitable.

This does not imply building everything internally. Mar noted that developing from scratch is more expensive and complex, and that pre-built solutions from reliable third-party providers allow a wallet to add features quickly and efficiently.

According to her, ChangeNOW's product offerings have followed that approach. Since partners can receive swap profits in any supported coin, the company introduced auto-conversion into USDT or another selected currency to mitigate volatility risk.

Wallets preferred not to manage support issues related to KYC and AML freezes, so ChangeNOW developed a pre-check that rejects deposits it cannot pay out. Mar stated that this reduced those cases to nearly zero.

Gasless USDT swaps on Tron emerged from a similar request. A user wishing to swap USDT for Bitcoin requires TRX for gas, an issue Mar said she had personally encountered. The feature allows users to send USDT on Tron without paying gas, which she stated improves the conversion from user to active swapper.

In summary, Mar's metric for a small wallet is what the user ultimately receives, not the fee displayed. According to her, ChangeNOW's partner features were built iteratively based on requests to prevent users from leaving the app to complete swaps. For wallets unable to compete with larger rivals on price, she identifies that as the business opportunity.