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If you have ever moved value between Bitcoin and Ethereum, you have probably met the bridge: you lock your BTC on one chain and receive a 'wrapped' token on the other — an IOU that promises the original is still sitting there. The IOU is only as good as whoever holds the original. When that custodian fails, the wrapped token can go to zero while your real coins sit frozen.

Decentralized cross-chain swaps skip the IOU entirely. Instead of a custodian, a network of independent nodes jointly controls the liquidity pools — using threshold signature cryptography, where no single machine ever holds a complete key. A swap is not a mint and not a bridge transfer: it is a real deposit into a pool on one chain, and a real payout from a pool on the other. There is no wrapped version of your coin anywhere in the middle.

The rate you get comes from the depth of those pools, not from an order book with hidden spreads. Aggregating across many liquidity networks at once — and picking the deepest path for your specific pair and amount — is how a good router consistently beats any single exchange's headline rate.

This is also why no account is needed. The network does not know who you are and does not need to: your deposit address is the identity of the swap. You send funds, the network observes them on-chain, and the payout is broadcast to the address you chose. No email, no profile, no relationship to maintain.

When you start a swap, the service generates a single reference — your swap ID. That string is the entire relationship between you and the exchange. It points to the pair, the amounts, the addresses involved, and the live status of the transfer. Nothing else is stored, because nothing else is needed.

Notably absent: your email, your IP, your device fingerprint, and any form of identity. There is no login to hack and no profile to leak. If you open your swap page on a different device, you see the same public status — because the ID is not a secret credential, it is a tracking reference.

One honest limitation: if you lose the ID, it cannot be recovered. There is no email on file to send it to and no account to reset — by design. That is why we recommend saving it, and why recent swaps you open are remembered locally in your own browser (and only there) so you can get back to them.

Your deposit address stays valid for 24 hours from the moment the swap is created. After that it expires and the page shows it clearly — but a late deposit is still detected and processed at the current rate rather than lost, with any leftover refunded. The swap page itself stays online indefinitely, so you can check the final status weeks or months later.

A swap moves through a fixed pipeline, and every stage is visible on your swap page the moment it happens. First, waiting: your one-time deposit address exists and the network is watching for your transaction. Second, deposit detected: your transaction is seen on-chain, but not yet final — most chains need several confirmations before the funds are spendable. This stage is the least predictable, because confirmation time depends on network congestion, not on us.

Third, exchanging: your funds are swapped at the best available rate across decentralized liquidity networks. Fourth, payout broadcast: the output transaction has been sent to your receive address. Finally, complete — the funds are in your wallet. For most pairs the whole journey takes 10 to 40 minutes.

The deposit address is generated fresh for your swap and never reused. Funds flow straight through the pipeline to your wallet — we do not hold balances, and there is no pooled hot wallet with everyone's coins in it.

And if something fails — a deposit below the minimum, a pair that dropped mid-swap, a timeout — the default outcome is a refund to the same address the funds came from. If you provided a separate refund address when starting the swap, that is used instead. A failed swap returns your money; it does not keep it.

Monero is the outlier among major assets. Where Bitcoin records every amount and address in the open, Monero uses ring signatures to hide the sender among decoys, stealth addresses to hide the recipient, and confidential amounts to hide the value. Every transaction is private by default, not as an option.

That privacy is exactly why XMR cannot sit in an ordinary decentralized liquidity pool the way ETH or DOGE can. A pool contract on a transparent chain cannot verify a Monero payment it cannot see. So XMR pairs are routed through specialized private liquidity instead — a different mechanism than transparent-chain pools, but the same promise: you send XMR, the best available rate is applied, and the output lands in your wallet.

In practice an XMR swap behaves like any other: you get a one-time deposit address, a live status page, and an estimated completion window of 10 to 40 minutes. The main difference is timing — Monero blocks confirm quickly, so XMR legs often move faster than the transparent-chain side of the pair.

One tip: Monero wallets generate a new stealth address for every transaction, so 'the same address' is less meaningful on the XMR side than elsewhere. If a swap fails, the refund goes to the address your funds actually came from — or to the refund address you entered.