D'CENT Wallet Passes 1 Million Registered Users After Swap Integration

D'CENT Crosses One Million Users

The South Korean hardware wallet maker D'CENT passed one million registered users in 2025, with more than 40,000 people opening the app daily and device sales close to tripling year over year, ChangeNOW's published case study on the project reports. The number is modest beside the largest self-custody brands, but it marks an inflection point: the count of supported tokens has stopped selling wallets. Storage, once the entire product, is now the entry point, and the question that decides which wallets survive is what happens after the coin lands. A few years ago the playbook was simple. List the trending coin ahead of rivals, hold the hyped token no one else carried, and users came. Data published by CoinGecko shows more than 11.5 million cryptocurrencies failed last year, most of them meme coins, and platforms like Pump.fun let anyone mint a token in minutes at almost no cost. When assets are effectively infinite and any one of them sits a single integration away, a long asset list stops being an advantage and becomes a commodity. Demand shifted the product too. After centralized-exchange failures through the last bear market, most users prefer holding their own keys, and they expect that self-custody app to do everything the exchange once did: buy and sell, trade across chains, stake, put idle stablecoins to work and pay with a card. The blur between storage and trading venue is the shift our Crypto Exchange vs Crypto Wallets comparison tracks. D'CENT hit that wall head-on. Users held assets on the device and had to leave it to do anything with them, so the team rebuilt the product as what it calls an “action wallet,” adding in-app swaps through ChangeNOW's exchange API. The usage curve bent almost immediately after that integration went live.

Cake Wallet's 117x Growth

Cake Wallet faced the same build-or-buy question earlier and answered it with leaner infrastructure. Its users had moved from one asset to many and needed a way to trade inside the app, but building an exchange engine in-house meant KYC, AML and licensing work that would have swallowed the small team. The developers plugged in a third-party swap API instead and kept their people on security and the interface. ChangeNOW's case study on the project reports 117x growth: the install base climbed from 15,000 downloads to 1.75 million users, with 300,000 people active each month. Stablecoins run underneath both stories. Settlement volumes reached the trillions in 2025 and are closing in on the legacy card networks; a dollar moves across a chain in under a second, for a fraction of a cent. Wallets that make it easy to hold, spend and earn on stablecoins are the ones capturing daily use, and daily use is what compounds. Usability remains the other gate. Seed phrases, the recovery mechanism behind every HD wallet, still scare newcomers away, and choosing the right chain confuses them. New account-abstraction standards soften both problems: a wallet can sponsor gas fees, batch transactions and hide the chain entirely, so the product behaves like an ordinary app. MetaMask now lets a user grant a decentralized application narrow permission, capping spending at 10 USDC daily or letting a strategy run across 30 days, all under one approval. A wallet a newcomer can use without reading a tutorial is the one that travels.

Revenue Moves From Installs to Activity

Both case studies, and the pattern ChangeNOW's team reports across wallets of every size, point to one conclusion: the products that survive move fast and secure partnerships early. A wallet that manages everything is really several businesses in one, since swaps, staking, on- and off-ramps, card rails and cross-chain routing each carry their own liquidity and compliance burden. Even the largest teams buy ready-made components rather than build everything, which turns the exchange API and the card program into the wallet industry's new supply chain. Trust Wallet, for its part, optimizes for returning users, because the user who comes back is the user who transacts. Our read of the numbers: installs were always rentable, so the metric that now separates winners from the rest is the share of users who return and act, and the vendors that integrated early, D'CENT and Cake Wallet among them, are already compounding that advantage.