Cross-Chain Swaps as a New Revenue Line: How Internet Money Built Them on ChangeNOW

Context

Internet Money is a non-custodial crypto wallet based in the US, where the regulatory framework for crypto is undefined and the team checks major decisions with legal counsel. The product is built around three principles — security, privacy, transparency — held as constraints: the app is open source, it collects no user data, and the founders operate under their own names.

The wallet was funded by its community: $1.6M raised in under five hours from 2,000 participants. That sets the obligation the product works against — returning value to the people who paid for it. Internet Money does this through a revenue share: holders of the TIME token receive a cut of the wallet's own on-chain swap revenue and have earned close to $1M to date, under a model the team says no other wallet offers.

Internet Money has passed 125,000 downloads across Android, iOS, and Chrome, adds roughly 70 installs a day, and targets 1M. Live figures are published at internetmoney.io/stats.

The problem

Built-in swaps are a baseline user expectation. Internet Money covers part of that demand itself: swaps between assets on the same network run on the wallet's own on-chain swap feature, with volume recorded in its own systems. That engine is also what funds the revenue share.

Cross-chain swaps are a separate problem. They require liquidity and settlement across networks with independent finality, plus operations for every network supported. Building that in-house meant a long development cycle and high cost for a team of this size; skipping it left the wallet incomplete.

That made an external provider the practical option, and any provider had to fit the principles above — no custody of user funds, no data collection, no KYC friction on the user's side.

The task

Add cross-chain swaps to Android, iOS, and Chrome within those constraints and without a long development cycle. The choice of provider was a product decision rather than a procurement one: whatever the provider supported defined what users could swap without leaving the wallet.

The solution

Internet Money went with ChangeNOW, the one provider whose cross-chain coverage included PulseChain — the network its community was based on at the time. The wallet has since grown onto other networks, the same integration covered them as they came, and ChangeNOW remains its only cross-chain swap provider.

The scope is cross-chain only. Users swap between blockchain-native coins across networks through ChangeNOW's exchange flow; same-chain swaps stay on Internet Money's own feature.

Against the remaining conditions:

• Custody. ChangeNOW is a non-custodial exchange aggregator — funds are not held on the provider's side, so the wallet's custody model is unchanged by the integration.
• Coverage. The cross-chain layer spans the networks a multi-chain wallet actually needs, including chains most aggregators never list — PulseChain then, and everything Internet Money has added since.

Implementation

The provider-side integration was straightforward and was not where the work went. The main effort was the interface: Internet Money built the swap UI and UX separately for Android, iOS, and the Chrome extension. That was also the hardest part of the project, and it was client-side work rather than anything imposed by the integration.

For a product team planning a similar move, the effort splits along the same line — provider-side work is bounded, and the number of clients determines the timeline.

Results

Cross-chain swaps are live in all three clients, and all volume Internet Money sends to ChangeNOW originates inside the wallet.

Users reach 1,500+ assets across 90+ networks at the best rate ChangeNOW's aggregation returns — without leaving the app, creating an account, or handing funds to a third party.

The feature also opened a second revenue line for the product. ChangeNOW returns a share of every cross-chain swap to the partner, so the coverage users gained is income for the wallet at the same time. On-chain swaps and their volume stay on Internet Money's own services.

As the wallet has expanded beyond PulseChain, cross-chain coverage has extended with it — without a second provider or another integration cycle.

Why it worked

The integration gave the wallet reach it had not built and revenue it had not had, without touching custody or data handling. Users got the swaps they expect from a multi-chain wallet, in the app, at an aggregated rate; the product got a new income stream from a feature it would otherwise have paid to build. Coverage keeps pace as the wallet adds networks, so the feature widens without another integration cycle.

"The ChangeNOW team is responsive and professional. If we could go back in time and choose a different company to partner with early, we wouldn't."

— KG, Founder, Internet Money

For wallets and dApps

The same layer is available through ChangeNOW's REST API, or through the widget if the swap flow doesn't need to be built from scratch. Fixed and floating rates are both supported, partner revenue starts at 0.4% per swap, and payouts go to an address you control.

What the timeline depends on is on your side: how many clients you ship and how much of the interface is custom. Getting an API key is a single request to the partnerships team.

This post is commissioned by ChangeNOW and does not serve as a testimonial or endorsement by The Block. This post is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment, tax, legal or other advice. You should conduct your own research and consult independent counsel and advisors on the matters discussed within this post. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results.