ChangeNOW Executive Makes the Super App Case at TOKEN2049 in Singapore

ChangeNOW's Super App Pitch in Singapore

ChangeNOW's Martin Masser opened his TOKEN2049 interview in Singapore with a habit most readers will recognize: opening a banking app when there is nothing to pay. He said he checks that app constantly, and crypto platforms want the same slot in a customer's day. The super app model bundles trading with payments, borrowing and yield inside one application, so users have a reason to come back between trades. Masser started from the limits of swapping. Some traders execute several transactions daily, others swap every few days or once a week, and users who simply HODL can go long stretches without touching an exchange at all. For the infrequent majority, checking earnings and reviewing past transactions can become the reason to open the app, the way a bank customer looks at a balance without moving money. Kaiko's 2026 research describes the same drift across the industry: exchanges expanding into broader financial platforms that connect trading balances to yield products and spending services, on the logic that the more activity sits in one place, the more chances a platform keeps the customer and the funds. Payment surfaces, whether card products such as Tangem Pay or buying crypto with Apple Pay in mainstream wallets, belong to that same expansion. The most immediate pull, Masser said, comes from a recurring customer problem: USDT received on one blockchain and needed on another. He admitted to buying crypto on one platform and swapping it somewhere else himself, because everything is much easier to manage in one place. Expansion still has a ceiling. Features that do not fit the product have no place in it, he said, citing McDonald's ordering inside a crypto app as a design that would sit badly. The interview offered no retention figures for ChangeNOW itself, so the case rests on described behavior, not measured usage.

Telegram Lessons and the $401B Stablecoin Test

Masser's caution comes from his time at the TON Foundation. Teams that launched applications inside Telegram assumed its enormous reach would convert into users on its own; in his account, they came back complaining they had none, and his reply was to ask “Have you done any marketing?” That experience shapes how he handles partnerships, his remit at ChangeNOW. He said he does not want a collaboration that exists only to put his company's name on a press release, and he judges each deal by who the partner's customers actually are. ChangeNOW's API lets developers wire swap functionality into their own applications, which he argued spares teams from building the feature themselves and from maintaining support for each new blockchain; a partner might start with swaps and layer payments in later. Successful teams, in his telling, began with what people wanted and worked to reach them, which informs the questions he now asks developers about why a product exists and how success is defined. Stablecoins are the practical test for whether any of this belongs in daily financial life. A recent Alvarez & Marsal analysis estimates at least $401 billion in stablecoin payments during the first eight months of 2026, a 42% rise year over year, though businesses received an estimated 58% to 64% of that volume, so the record does not yet show consumers spending tokens at checkout. Masser pointed to markets where stablecoins already move through everyday routines, the retail money layer that central bank digital currency projects also chase, as the reason to build services beyond holding and exchanging tokens. Asked how success should look five years out, his answer was unspectacular by design: that people use the app in ordinary life without noticing it is a crypto product at all.

Read together, the interview's two halves describe a thesis with an unproven middle. Masser supplies the behavioral argument and names the cross-chain friction, while the Alvarez & Marsal record he leans on shows demand concentrated in businesses, which took up to 64% of payment volume, rather than consumers. That gap is where the super app race will be decided: the platforms that erase the multi-step USDT transfer and add spending without cluttering their interfaces are the ones that earn the daily habit he describes. Until retention data surfaces, the claim stays an argument, not a result. As ever, readers should DYOR before parking funds on any single platform, and can compare the field in our Best Crypto Exchanges overview.