ChangeNOW Casts Payments as Super App Hook Across Four TOKEN2049 Panels

Payments as the Daily Hook

ChangeNOW built its presence at TOKEN2049 Singapore around four panel discussions that kept returning to one question: what gives a crypto product a reason to be opened every day. The company's answer, shared by several speakers, was payments. The event ran at Marina Bay Sands on October 7 and 8, with organizers counting roughly 25,000 attendees, 500 exhibitors and 300 speakers. In the super app panel, Rubic co-founder Aleksandra Korneva noted that many swap users have no reason to transact daily, since an exchange is a task rather than a habit. Pulsar Money CEO Alex Radu identified payments and trading as the two foundations for apps that combine several financial services. “They just want to transact in a safe and secure and cheap way,” Korneva said. ChangeNOW's Chief Strategy Officer Pauline Shangett told the same discussion that payments are one potential foundation for these apps. Not everyone accepted the everything-app framing: CoinRoutes' Michelle Herman argued that specialized services still have a role and stressed protecting customer information and delivering reliable execution over breadth. A separate session on audience growth examined how users will find such products as AI tools reshape search. Media participants said they are investing more in interviews, podcasts and direct reader relationships as search traffic becomes harder to depend on. CoinEasy offered a local counterpoint, saying its Korean community and domestic search presence had limited the impact so far, while it works through AI tools, offline events and physical products. ChangeNOW itself began as a no-KYC crypto exchange and now positions itself as a super app that folds swapping, storage, spot trading and other tools into one place.

Keynote, Wallets and Infrastructure

Shangett's Bit Digital Stage keynote, titled “Next Billion Users Should Never Touch Blockchain,” argued that people should be able to use crypto without picking networks, managing gas or moving between separate services. The wallet session, moderated by Kelvin Sparks at the ChangeNOW booth, then took up how much of a transaction an app should handle for its users. Yana, ChangeNOW's Head of Business Development and Account Management, said users should not have to think about gas or pass through several steps to switch networks when much of that can run in the background. MetaMask's representative described AI agents that execute transactions on a user's behalf. Trezor software product lead Denis described exploring how a hardware device could let users approve agent-initiated actions, a design that keeps the private key away from connected machines, and cautioned against hiding every detail behind a simpler interface, saying information should stay available when users need it. The infrastructure session brought together Banxa, RocketX, WalletConnect and Aztec Labs on transaction routing, privacy and collaboration between specialized providers. WalletConnect's Diana Alexandrova argued that everyday payments should not demand technical expertise: “They don't have to be cryptographers.” Aztec Labs pointed to privacy as a requirement for wider adoption, noting businesses would not want employee payments visible to the public. Banxa called for cooperation among specialized infrastructure providers, and RocketX described pulling liquidity from different sources into a unified interface. ChangeNOW also used the event to show a co-branded cold wallet with CoolWallet, carrying ChangeNOW as the exclusive in-app swap provider, and journalist Ramia Farrage recorded NOW Effect interviews with representatives of Stellar, Injective, NEAR Intents, USDD, Sonic and Zcash covering cross-border payments, stablecoins, privacy and blockchain usability. The company said the panels and interviews were recorded for release as part of its TOKEN2049 coverage.

The two threads point at the same constraint. The builders on stage agreed that token swaps are episodic and that payments would give a wallet a daily job, which is why Shangett named payments a foundation rather than an add-on. The unresolved part is trust. An interface that hides gas, networks and steps must still show users enough to catch an agent doing something they did not intend, and the Trezor proposal to approve agent-initiated actions on a hardware device is one attempt at that balance. For now the outputs are recordings, a co-branded wallet and a positioning claim; whether payments-grade everyday use arrives in these apps is what the next product releases will test.