Small Wallets, Big Leak: Why Your Swap Button Is Costing You Revenue 💸

Yana Mar, Head of B2B and Partnerships at ChangeNOW, used a stage appearance at TOKEN2049 in Singapore to spell out a familiar pattern for smaller crypto wallets: a user opens the app, looks for a swap button, doesn't find one, and leaves to trade elsewhere, taking the fee with them. "The community itself doesn't pay," she said, framing storage-only wallets as a retention problem dressed up as a product.

Mar drew a sharp line between users who store assets and users who transact, and argued that storage alone generates no revenue. "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. Her prescription for wallets looking to monetize their base was straightforward: build in swaps, buy and sell, staking and trading, so activity and fees stay inside the app rather than migrating to a competitor.

She acknowledged the cost barrier that pushes smaller teams away from that menu. Building and maintaining fiat, swap and staking infrastructure in-house, she said, lands hardest on smaller operators, and her advice was to skip the from-scratch build and integrate ready-made providers instead. With the largest wallet providers now offering everything from stablecoin spending to tokenized stock trading, she added, smaller teams face a narrow lane and need to pick a focus.

Mar outlined five ways a smaller wallet can stand out: target a specific region with local payment methods and support, target a specific audience (she cited Dreamster, a ChangeNOW Fast Track participant built for music fans that lets users buy, share and trade Digital Music Assets inside the wallet), lead on a specific promise such as security given the year's hacking activity, ship features in a week that take larger wallets months or quarters, and protect user experience as the product scales. Each option, in her telling, is a way to compete without trying to out-spend a major wallet.

She also pushed back on the recent wave of zero-fee stablecoin swaps rolled out by bigger competitors, arguing the offer is narrower than it looks. The promotion covers a limited number of networks and coins, waives only the wallet's own fee rather than the network fee, and does not extend to cross-chain swaps. "It's not the main revenue stream of the big wallet itself, so they could just afford it," she said. Mar's conclusion was that a smaller wallet does not need to match that headline-grabbing perk to hold its audience, and can compete on focus, speed and product quality instead.