ChangeNOW's Four TOKEN2049 Panels Position Payments as Crypto's Daily Use Case

ChangeNOW's Four Panels Put Payments First

TOKEN2049 Singapore's stage turned into a referendum on the super app model, with four panel discussions hosted by ChangeNOW pulling executives from MetaMask, Trezor, WalletConnect, Rubic, Pulsar Money and CoinRoutes into one shared question: what gives a person a reason to open a crypto application every day? The common challenge the sessions exposed was blunt. Crypto companies keep shipping features, yet everyday adoption stays difficult, and most people have no need to trade digital assets daily. Rubic co-founder Aleksandra Korneva opened the super app discussion with exactly that observation: people who exchange cryptocurrencies a few times a year have little reason to return to the same application between transactions. Payments, she argued, could change that behavior, giving the software a daily role that occasional exchange volume cannot supply. Pulsar Money CEO Alex Radu went further, naming payments alongside spot trading as the practical foundations for applications that combine several financial services. Users, in his words, “just want to transact in a safe and secure and cheap way.” Consolidation did not go unchallenged on stage. Michelle Herman of CoinRoutes questioned whether folding every function into one platform is automatically better, noting that specialized services can deliver stronger execution and tighter protection of customer information. The four sessions, run under ChangeNOW's banner across super apps, wallets, infrastructure and discovery, left the room with an unresolved design question: how much functionality does a financial application actually need before the extra features begin working against it?

Wallet UX, Privacy and Discovery

A second thread ran through the wallet session, where panelists argued that transaction complexity is still the largest barrier between ordinary users and paying on-chain. Moving funds across blockchain networks, whether through bridges or an atomic swap, can mean managing gas fees and stepping through several screens. ChangeNOW's Yana said much of that complexity should simply disappear: “The user shouldn't have to think about gas.” MetaMask's representative described how AI agents could eventually execute transactions on a user's behalf, while Trezor software product lead Denis discussed hardware wallets approving agent-initiated actions and warned that simpler interfaces must not strip out the transaction details a user needs in order to verify what they are signing. The infrastructure panel moved the conversation closer to the payment itself. WalletConnect's Diana Alexandrova argued that consumers should be able to pay without understanding the underlying technology, saying “they don't have to be cryptographers.” Aztec Labs raised the corporate side of the same issue: businesses cannot operate normally when salaries and other sensitive payments are visible to anyone on a public ledger. Banxa emphasized cooperation between infrastructure providers over any single integration, and RocketX described combining liquidity sources into one interface, the aggregation work that resembles a market maker layer. The closing session turned to distribution. Media participants said they are shifting toward interviews, podcasts and direct audience relationships as traditional search traffic becomes less dependable, while CoinEasy reported that its established Korean community and domestic search presence had limited that disruption.

The agenda itself is COINOTAG's takeaway from the four sessions: the wallet industry has moved its mainstream pitch from speculation to payments, and the open debates are now execution details rather than the principle of adoption. A retail base built around the HODL habit does not open an application daily, which is the exact gap Korneva and Radu described, and the objection Aztec Labs raised shows that payroll and merchant payments, the highest-volume use cases, cannot ship on fully transparent ledgers as they stand. Until gas abstraction, agent approvals and payment privacy are solved together, the super app thesis stays a conference argument rather than a shipped product.