How long does a crypto swap take?

01Where the minutes go

A swap has three phases, and they are very unequal.

1. Your deposit confirms — most of the wait You broadcast a transaction; miners or validators include it in a block; the desk waits for enough confirmations to consider it final. How many depends on the network and on the amount. On Bitcoin this is tens of minutes. On Solana it is seconds.
2. The exchange — seconds Once the deposit is final, the trade executes against the desk’s liquidity. With a floating rate this is the moment your rate is set.
3. The payout — seconds to minutes The desk broadcasts the payout to your address. You will see it arrive quickly on a fast chain; on Bitcoin it appears as unconfirmed within a minute or two and confirms with the next block. Monero adds its own 20-minute lock on incoming funds, inside your wallet.

02Typical times by the network you send from

Block times are protocol facts. Confirmation times are typical values under normal load, not promises: a congested network or an underpriced transaction can multiply them.

03What the desk forecasts right now

Every quote comes with the desk’s own end-to-end forecast. These are today’s, for six common routes:

Read from live quotes at 17:49 UTC. The forecast is a range on purpose: the lower bound is a well-priced deposit on a quiet network, the upper bound is not a cap.

04What makes a swap slow

• A low fee on the deposit. The number one cause, almost always on Bitcoin. A transaction priced below the going rate waits until the backlog clears — hours, sometimes a day. Nobody but the sender can change that, and only if the wallet supports fee bumping (RBF).
• Withdrawing from an exchange. Exchanges queue, batch and sometimes manually review withdrawals. The swap has not started until the exchange actually broadcasts.
• Network congestion. Busy periods raise fees and slow confirmations on every chain, the slow ones most.
• A missing memo or tag on a deposit that needed one. The funds arrive but cannot be matched to your order automatically — see the memo guide.
• An amount outside the limits. A deposit under the pair’s minimum cannot be exchanged and goes to the refund path instead.
• Screening. Every deposit address is screened automatically by the settling desk. For ordinary deposits this adds nothing noticeable; the rare flagged one is the single case where a swap is held, as the AML policy spells out.

05Yours is taking too long? A checklist

1. Read the state on the order page Find your order by its ID — no login. “Waiting for deposit” means the desk has not seen your transaction yet; “confirming” means it has, and the chain is doing its part.
2. Still “waiting”? Check your own transaction Look it up in a block explorer. Not there at all: your wallet or exchange has not broadcast it. There but unconfirmed: it is in the queue, and the fee decides how long.
3. “Confirming” for a long time? Normal on Bitcoin with a modest fee. The order moves on by itself once the confirmations are in — you do not need to do anything.
4. Over an hour in “exchanging” or “sending” That is unusual. Write to support with the order ID. There is no account to look up: the ID is all we need.

A fixed-rate order has a deadline. If the deposit confirms after the window, it is returned to your refund address rather than exchanged. When to pick which.

06Questions people ask