Why Small Crypto Wallets Struggle to Turn Users Into Revenue

A user opens a small crypto wallet, looks for a swap button, and does not find one. They close the app, make the trade somewhere else, and the fee goes with them.

Yana Mar, Head of B2B and Partnerships at ChangeNOW, described that moment at TOKEN2049 in Singapore as bad for the user experience and bad for the wallet’s retention. The user is still a customer of the wallet. The fee from that swap is not.

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

Where Does the Money Go When a User Leaves to Swap?

Mar’s starting point was the difference between a user who stores assets and one who transacts. In her account, storage alone brings a wallet nothing.

“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.

A wallet that wants income from its community should offer swaps, a buy and sell feature, staking and trading, she argued. Keeping those tasks inside the app gives users a reason to stay and raises in-app activity.

Infrastructure costs press from the other side. Mar said the cost of building and maintaining that infrastructure weighs hardest on small wallets.

Her advice to small teams was to skip building from scratch and plug in ready-made solutions for fiat, swaps, and staking instead.

Where Can a Small Wallet Win When Big Ones Offer It All?

The biggest wallet providers now offer everything from stablecoin spending to tokenized stock trading, which leaves a smaller team with a narrow path. Mar’s answer was to pick one.

“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 focus could mean adding local payment methods and a local support team.
• A specific audience: An audience focus looks like Dreamster, a ChangeNOW Fast Track participant built for music fans. Users buy Digital Music Assets, share in individual songs, and play them inside the wallet. A share can be sold back at any time.
• A specific promise: One partner has built its pitch around security, a choice Mar said stands out given the hacks across the market.
• Speed: A small team can ship features in a week that take a big wallet months or quarters.
• Quality: As a product grows bigger, the user experience sometimes suffers, which small teams can avoid.

Zero-Fee Swaps: Why Small-Wallet Holders Shouldn’t Chase Them?

Some larger wallets have stopped collecting their own fee on certain stablecoin swaps, a move a smaller wallet cannot easily match. 

Mar’s answer was to look at the offer more closely. It applies to a limited number of networks and a limited number of coins. Only the wallet’s own fee is waived, so the network fee still applies, and cross-chain swaps are not included.

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

A small wallet does not have to offer the same thing to keep its audience engaged, she argued. It can stand out on the experience instead, including cross-chain swaps and support for assets that big wallets do not list or route well. 

She also questioned whether the label matters more than the result. From a user’s perspective, she said, what counts is what you receive rather than what the fee is.

“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.

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In-Wallet Support: How To Delegate It

Support is a key factor when a wallet relies on built-in exchange services. Once those features go live, the question arises of who should handle user issues when a transaction fails.

Mar drew a clear line. The exchange provider is responsible for solving the problem with the transaction, she said, because providing a good service is the provider’s job. The wallet is responsible for the relationship with the user.

In ChangeNOW’s case, a partner sends over the transaction ID, and ChangeNOW works out what happened. That holds even when the user caused the problem by sending a deposit on the wrong network, in the wrong coin, or without 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 Start Earning From Day One?

ChangeNOW launched its Free Fast Track program in March for new and early-stage wallets. Mar described it as help with the two things those wallets are looking for: traffic and profit.

A participant integrates ChangeNOW’s exchange API and earns from swaps as soon as it goes live. Whenever a user swaps, the partner takes a share of the revenue, starting at 0.4%. 

ChangeNOW adds marketing support on top, from cross-promotion and press releases to podcasts and a presence at TOKEN2049.

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

What Should Wallet Teams Stop Doing and What They Should Do

Mar’s first piece of advice for wallet teams was to keep security at the top of the list. She said the industry had lost around $1 billion to hacks in the past half-year, and that fear of hacks and scams has always been one of the blockers to mass adoption.

Her figure is on the low side of recent counts. PeckShield data put September losses alone at $766.49 million, with the Bitget breach accounting for roughly $387 million of that.

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

Her second instruction was to keep adding features and products, since nearly every wallet now has buy, sell, and staking. Standing out means listening to what users need, she argued, even when a request does not look like a fit at first.

That does not mean building everything in-house. Mar said building from scratch is more costly and more complicated, and that ready-made solutions from trustworthy third-party providers let a wallet add features fast and efficiently.

ChangeNOW’s own product list has followed that pattern, in her account. Partners can receive swap profit in any supported coin, so the company added auto-conversion into USDT or another currency of their choice to reduce volatility risk. 

Wallets did not want to handle support cases tied to KYC and AML stops, so ChangeNOW built a pre-check that declines deposits it will not pay out. Mar said that cut such cases to almost zero.

Gasless USDT swaps on Tron came from the same kind of request. A user who wants to exchange USDT for Bitcoin needs TRX to cover gas, a problem Mar said she had run into herself. The feature lets users send USDT on Tron without paying gas, which she said improves conversion from a user into an active swap.

Overall, Mar’s measure for a small wallet is what the user ends up with, rather than the fee on the label. By her account, ChangeNOW’s partner features were built one request at a time to keep users from leaving the app to finish a swap. For a wallet that cannot match a bigger rival on price, that is where she sees the business.