Why Small Crypto Wallets Struggle To Turn Users Into Revenue

What Happened

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.

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.

A specific promise: One partner has built its pitch around security, a choice Mar said stands out given the hacks across the market.

Market Context

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.

Why It Matters

A specific region: A regional focus could mean adding local payment methods and a local support team.

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

Details

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.

“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.

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?

“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 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.

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.

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.