A crypto wallet’s feature list comes with recurring bills. Maintaining payment connections and handling failed transactions takes people and infrastructure. Fee promotions add another claim on the budget. This week, we’re looking at how those commitments shape a smaller provider’s business, alongside our October security update and the announcement of NOW AI.
How Small Crypto Wallets Compete
Small crypto wallets can compete by focusing on a particular region or community. The team can then prioritize the payment methods, networks and support its customers need, giving it a clearer basis for development and spending.
In her TOKEN2049 interview with BeInCrypto, Yana Mar, Head of B2B and Partnerships at ChangeNOW, argues for specialization. A regional focus might mean local payment methods and a local support team. An audience-led product could build around a shared interest: she cites Dreamster, a Fast Track participant where music fans can buy shares in individual songs and play the music inside the wallet.
They should think of something specific, like a specific audience or specific region.
— Yana Mar, Head of B2B and Partnerships at ChangeNOW
Mar also identifies speed as an advantage: a small team may ship a feature in a week that takes a larger organization months or quarters. Her recommendation is to use ready-made infrastructure for services such as fiat access, swaps and staking, avoiding the expense of developing everything internally.
The NOW Wallet and Phantom comparison shows how many features the two products have in common. Both include swaps, perpetual futures, prediction markets and tokenized stocks. Their network coverage differs substantially: NOW Wallet supports more than 70 blockchains, including TRON, TON and Monero; Phantom supports fewer than ten, with Solana remaining central to its offering.
Each additional network brings integration and maintenance work. A smaller team needs to weigh that commitment against how its customers are likely to use the chain.
Who Pays for Zero-Fee Swaps?
A wallet waiving its swap fee forgoes that charge on eligible transactions. Revenue from other services may help make the offer affordable, and customers may still pay network fees.
Matching a competitor’s zero-fee promotion starts with checking what it covers. The stablecoin swaps Mar discusses are limited to selected coins and networks, with cross-chain exchanges excluded. Estimating the cost of those transactions helps the team decide whether to match the promotion or spend the budget elsewhere.
Sponsoring network fees creates a separate expense. The gasless-transactions guide describes how operators restrict eligible actions and cap spending per user. Without those limits, automated requests can drain the sponsorship budget. Failed onchain execution can also consume gas.
An app might sponsor a first transaction as an acquisition expense. Charging customers in a token they already hold uses a different model: the customer reimburses the execution cost, and the service calculates and collects that payment.
Before deciding what to fund, a wallet team also needs to understand its exchange provider’s pricing. Jane S’s rate breakdown describes the spread, service fee, network costs and pair liquidity that can affect an estimate. Fixed-rate protection adds a premium, while floating-rate estimates can change before settlement.
As Mar puts it:
Users actually care about what lands in the wallet instead of a zero-fee label.
— Yana Mar, Head of B2B and Partnerships at ChangeNOW
Crypto Integration Support
When an integrated swap goes wrong, the wallet team remains the customer’s point of contact. The exchange provider investigates the transaction, so both teams need an agreed way to share the details and keep the customer informed.
Mar describes partners sending ChangeNOW the transaction ID for investigation, including when a deposit arrives on the wrong network, in the wrong asset or without a required memo.
Batch payouts create a similar need to track individual outcomes as transaction volume grows. A finance team can submit thousands of payments through a CSV file or API. It still needs individual payment results and records it can reconcile with its accounts.
If your payout volume grows tenfold and your finance team has to grow with it, you’ve scaled the workload. The business still needs a better process.
— Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments
After a timeout, the team needs to check whether the payment went through before submitting it again. Otherwise, the recipient could be paid twice.
ChangeNOW Security Update
ChangeNOW fixed a vulnerability in the integration between its support system and website. The vulnerability did not provide access to customer-account balances or assets. We also announced NOW AI, a dedicated protection lab.
Our support-system notice describes the issue identified with white-hat researchers. In the Chainwire release published on Decrypt, we stated that we had no evidence of exploitation at the time of the announcement. We nevertheless warned that email addresses and transaction details could potentially have been exposed. Our transaction infrastructure was not affected.
The incident accelerated the launch of NOW AI, intended to strengthen protection across ChangeNOW products. Other follow-up measures include reviewing third-party integrations, introducing AI-powered security analytics and ongoing testing. We will publish further details of NOW AI’s plans and implementation separately.
Treat unexpected messages claiming to come from ChangeNOW with caution, including those referring to a real transaction or support request. We will never ask for passwords, 2FA codes, private keys or seed phrases.
Thanks for reading this week’s digest! Before matching a competitor’s offer, work out what your customers would gain from it and what it would cost to keep running after launch.
