ChangeNOW's Yana Mar Says 98% of Swaps Land Within 0.5% Slippage

TOKEN2049: When the Swap Button Is Missing

A user opens a crypto wallet, hunts for a swap function and finds none. The trade gets done somewhere else, and the fee leaves with it. Yana Mar, who leads B2B and partnerships at ChangeNOW, put that exact moment at the center of her TOKEN2049 appearance in Singapore, describing it as a double loss for a smaller product: the person remains the wallet’s customer while the transaction revenue walks to a competitor. She compressed the problem into one line: “the community itself doesn’t pay.” Her starting point was the gap between a user who only stores assets and one who transacts. Storage on its own earns a wallet nothing, in her account. A team that wants income from its community has to keep swaps, a buy and sell feature, staking and a fuller set of order types in crypto trading inside the app, because that is what gives users a reason to stay and lifts in-app activity. Building and maintaining that infrastructure costs the most for the smallest teams, so her advice was direct: skip construction from scratch and plug in ready-made fiat, swap and staking services instead. Pressure arrives from the other side too. Some of the largest wallets have stopped charging their own fee on selected stablecoin swaps, a move a smaller rival cannot easily mirror. Mar told smaller teams to read the offer closely: it covers a limited number of networks and coins, waives only the wallet’s own fee while network fees still apply, and leaves cross-chain swaps out entirely. The giveaway is affordable, she said, because it is not the big wallet’s main revenue stream. She also questioned whether the label beats the result, arguing that users care about what arrives in their balance. By her company’s own numbers, 98% of ChangeNOW swaps land within roughly 0.5% slippage. Support follows the same boundary, in her telling: the exchange provider resolves a failed transaction while the wallet keeps the user relationship, with partners forwarding the transaction ID even when a user sent a deposit on the wrong network or without a memo.

Fast Track Program Pays From 0.4% Per Swap

For a small team facing incumbents that offer everything from stablecoin spending to tokenized stock trading, Mar’s prescription was to narrow the field rather than match it. She outlined five paths: commit to one region with local payment rails and a local support team, serve one audience, build the product around a single promise such as security, ship in a week what a large wallet delivers over months, and protect the user experience that tends to erode as products grow. Dreamster, a Fast Track participant built for music fans, is her worked example of the audience play: users buy shares in individual songs, play the tracks inside the wallet and can sell a share back at any time. The program behind that example, launched in March, is free and aimed at new and early-stage wallets. A participant integrates ChangeNOW’s exchange API and earns from swaps the moment it goes live, taking a revenue share that starts at 0.4% per swap, with marketing support layered on top: cross-promotion, press releases, podcasts and a TOKEN2049 presence. In her account, participants only need an audience and engagement to turn the integration into profit. Security topped her list of instructions for wallet teams. She put industry losses to hacks at around $1 billion over the past half-year and named fear of exploits and scams as a persistent brake on adoption, telling teams to build a product people will trust with their private key. That figure sits on the low side of recent counts: security analytics data put September losses alone at $766.49 million, with the Bitget breach accounting for roughly $387 million of it. ChangeNOW’s product roadmap has followed the same request-driven pattern, she said, adding auto-conversion of partner revenue into USDT and gasless USDT transfers on Tron, which removes the need for TRX to cover gas when a user exchanges the stablecoin for Bitcoin.

Read together, the two halves of the interview draw a line between marketing and economics. Zero-fee swaps work as a headline only for wallets that already earn elsewhere, so a small team competing on the sticker is fighting a battle priced out of its reach. The alternative Mar describes is to rent the infrastructure, turning a fixed engineering cost into a revenue share, and win users on slippage, coverage of assets the giants do not list and shipping speed. One partner has already built its entire pitch around security, a promise that speaks to the same fear she says blocks adoption, from careful key handling through to cold wallet custody. Her metric cuts through the noise: what lands in the user’s wallet is the number that counts.