The short version
- It is usually confirmations, not a failure. A crypto swap not received after ten minutes is almost always a deposit still waiting on its chain. The order page shows a live Confirmations 3 / 10 counter — read that first.
- The order page is the source of truth. There is no account and no support queue. The URL you got when the order was created carries the order ID and token, refreshes every eight seconds, and is where every action happens.
- Six causes cover nearly everything. The deposit never arrived, the chain is slow, the amount did not match the quote, the network was wrong, a memo was missing at the destination, or the order was flagged.
- The exit is an address, never a document. When an order needs a decision you get two buttons: refund to an address you provide, or accept the current market rate. Identity is never a condition of getting your money back.
- Only three mistakes are permanent. Wrong network, mistyped payout address, missing memo into an exchange account.
This guide is for the moment you are actually in: you sent the coins, the page is not saying what you want, and there is nobody to phone. That is the honest trade-off of a no-KYC swap — no account means no identity to hand over, and it also means no account manager. What replaces the support desk is a page that tells you the truth and a policy that always leaves you a way out.
Three things to check before you worry
- Open the order page. Not your wallet, not your inbox. It shows live status, the confirmation counter, and any action you need to take.
- Check the clock against the chain. Compare elapsed time with the confirmation threshold for the coin you sent, not the one you are receiving.
- Verify the deposit exists on-chain. Find the transaction ID in your sending wallet and confirm it was broadcast, to the exact address the order gave you.
How long a crypto swap should really take
A swap is three operations: your deposit confirms, the trade executes, the payout is broadcast. Only the first has a hard floor, and it is where essentially all the waiting happens. These are the confirmation thresholds actually in use, per network:
- Bitcoin — 2 confirmations. Ten-minute blocks, so budget roughly twenty minutes. One of the slowest deposit legs despite the low count.
- Monero — 10 confirmations. Two-minute blocks, so around twenty minutes too. This is why an XMR to BTC swap is never instant.
- Litecoin, Dash, Dogecoin — 6 confirmations. Roughly fifteen minutes for LTC and DASH, closer to six for DOGE.
- Bitcoin Cash — 3; Zcash — 10. Around thirty and twelve minutes respectively.
- Ethereum and ERC-20 — 2 confirmations. Well under a minute. The wait you feel on Ethereum is fee-driven inclusion, not the threshold.
- TRON and TRC-20 — 20 confirmations. Three-second blocks, so about a minute. The high count sounds alarming and is not.
- BNB Chain and Cardano — 15 confirmations. Under a minute for BSC, a few minutes for ADA.
- Solana — 32; Polygon — 64. The two largest counts and two of the fastest legs in practice — seconds for Solana, about two minutes for Polygon.
- XRP, Stellar, Ethereum layer-2s — 1 confirmation. Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, zkSync and Avalanche C-Chain settle in seconds.
Two lessons. The confirmation count means nothing on its own — 64 Polygon confirmations clear faster than 2 Bitcoin ones. And the slow leg is whichever chain you deposited on: if you are swapping Bitcoin, the twenty-minute wait is Bitcoin's, and no service can shorten it. To settle in seconds instead, choose before you start — see the stablecoin chain comparison, or the Lightning swap guide for the fastest Bitcoin leg that exists.
Decoding the status on your order page
The progress list is not decoration. Each state says where your funds are and who is acting:
- Awaiting your deposit. The address is live and nothing has arrived. If you already sent, the transaction has not been seen on-chain.
- Deposit detected on-chain. Visible but not confirmed. Where the Confirmations counter matters, and where most of the wait happens.
- Executing swap. Deposit accepted, trade being routed. Short in normal conditions.
- Sending to your wallet. The payout is being broadcast. From here the destination chain governs arrival.
- Settled. Done. The page shows the payout transaction ID — keep it.
- Expired — no deposit received. The window closed with nothing arriving.
- Action required. A decision is needed from you: a late deposit, an amount mismatch, or a flag.
- Refund in progress. A refund is moving to the address you supplied.
The page refreshes itself every eight seconds. There is no benefit to reloading harder, and no penalty for closing the tab provided you kept the URL.
Nothing has moved: the deposit never landed
If the page still awaits your deposit long after you sent, the problem is on the sending side.
Did the transaction broadcast? Find the transaction ID in your wallet. If the wallet shows it pending locally but no explorer knows it, it never reached the network — common with a fee set too low, or a wallet that lost connectivity mid-broadcast. Rebroadcast or bump the fee.
Did it go to the right address? Deposit addresses are single-use and belong to one order. Reusing an address from an earlier swap is a real failure mode: that order is closed and nothing is watching. Always copy from the order in front of you.
Did you send from an exchange? The order page warns against this for good reason. Exchange withdrawals are batched, can be delayed for hours, may arrive as several transactions, and sometimes arrive net of a fee — which becomes an underpayment. Send from a wallet you control; it is also the difference between a swap that is private and one that is not, as covered in wallet hygiene for privacy swaps.
Stuck on confirming: that is the chain, not the swap
A moving counter means nothing is wrong — you are watching a blockchain work. A counter frozen at zero means your transaction is sitting in the mempool waiting for a block, and the cause is nearly always the fee.
On Bitcoin and other UTXO chains, a fee below the going rate can wait hours or days. If your wallet supports replace-by-fee, rebroadcast at a higher fee and it confirms normally — the swap sees the same transaction ID and continues. On Ethereum the equivalent is a transaction stuck below the base fee, fixed by a speed-up from the same nonce.
Two rarer cases: a chain reorganisation can briefly reduce your confirmation count, and should recover within a block or two; and a low-fee transaction can be dropped from mempools entirely, at which point the funds never left your wallet and you can start again. Neither is caused by the swap service, and neither is something it can accelerate.
Stuck on executing or sending
Once your deposit is confirmed, it has passed the point of silent failure: the order will end in a payout or a refund offer. Delays here have narrower causes — an unusual pair with thin liquidity taking longer to route, or a congested destination chain.
If the status says the payout was sent, take the payout transaction ID and look it up on the destination chain's explorer. That answers the only question that matters. If your destination is Monero, remember your own wallet must also scan: funds can be on-chain and not yet visible in a wallet that is still syncing.
You sent a different amount than the quote
Overpayment is benign — the surplus is normally exchanged with the rest at the settled rate.
Underpayment is where fixed-rate orders get interesting. A fixed rate is a promise about a specific quantity, locked for roughly ten minutes from the moment your deposit is detected. Send less and the promise no longer fits what arrived, so the order raises the Action required panel: Refund me, which returns the deposit to an address you paste in, or Accept current rate, which completes the swap at the live price for the amount that landed. A float-rate order has no such promise to break — it prices whatever arrives, whenever it arrives.
The commonest accidental underpayment is not a typo. It is a wallet that deducts the network fee from the amount you typed rather than adding it on top. Check what your wallet is actually broadcasting, not what you entered.
Wrong asset, or the right asset on the wrong network
This is the category where money genuinely disappears, and it deserves blunt language.
A ticker is not a chain. USDT on Tron and USDT on Ethereum are separate tokens on separate ledgers sharing a name and a price. An address issued for one is not an address on the other. Send TRC-20 tokens to an ERC-20 deposit address and they exist on Tron at an address nobody monitors. Recovery depends on whether the upstream counterparty controls the same key on the other chain — sometimes true across EVM chains that share an address format, essentially never true otherwise. Treat it as lost. The stablecoin chains comparison exists largely to stop this happening.
The same applies to a mistyped payout address. You are solely responsible for the destination address, and mistyped addresses are generally irrecoverable — no chain here has a reversal mechanism. Paste, never retype; verify the first and last characters; send a small test first when the sum is large enough that losing it would matter.
The missing memo or destination tag
A memo, also called a destination tag, is an extra field carried alongside the address on chains like XRP and Toncoin. It exists because some recipients pool many users behind one address and need to tell them apart.
Two clarifications that save a lot of panic. This is a payout-side problem: deposit addresses issued for a swap are single-use and require no tag. And it only bites when your destination is an account at a centralised exchange — send XRP to your own wallet and no memo is needed, because that wallet has one owner.
If you did send to an exchange without the required memo, the funds are not gone but are no longer reachable by you: they sit in the exchange's suspense account, and only its support team can attribute them. That is a ticket with a company that will ask for your identity — a decent illustration of why receiving into a wallet you control is the better default, for recoverability and for the privacy reasons in is crypto swapping anonymous.
Your order expired, or the rate window closed
Orders do not stay open forever. Each carries an expiry — an hour where the upstream router does not specify a shorter one — after which an order with no deposit is marked Expired. If nothing was sent, nothing is at stake: start a new order and use the new deposit address.
The awkward version is a deposit arriving just after the window closes, or after a fixed-rate lock lapses. Funds are not discarded because a timer ran out; you get the same Action required panel — refund, or accept the current market rate. This is why a fixed rate is not automatically safer: it buys certainty about the amount and pays for it with a tighter deadline. On a chain with a twenty-minute deposit leg, a ten-minute lock is a promise you may struggle to keep. Float rates have no deadline to miss.
How a refund works when there is no account
The obvious objection to no-KYC swapping is that if something goes wrong there is no login, no ticket, no relationship. The answer is that the order page carries the authority itself: its URL contains the order ID and token, which is what proves you created the order — and why keeping the link matters more than anything else here.
When a decision is needed the page presents both paths side by side. Option A — Refund me asks for an address in the coin you deposited, plus a tag if that coin uses one, and returns the funds there. Option B — Accept current rate completes the swap at the live price. You choose; nothing is chosen for you.
The part worth underlining is what is not asked. Identity documents are never a precondition for a refund. That is what a refund-first policy means in practice, set out in full on the AML and compliance page. Because you supply the refund address at the moment you need it, there is no stored account for that guarantee to depend on.
Held for compliance: what a flag actually is
Occasionally an order stops with a message naming a flag reason. Knowing where it comes from removes most of the alarm. A no-KYC front end is not the regulated entity in the chain — the upstream liquidity provider is, and it screens deposit and payout addresses against sanctions lists and chain-analytics risk scores. A flag is that layer speaking, not a judgement about you.
The outcome is the same two options: refund, or accept the current rate and continue. The accept path is available where the flag concerns a late deposit or rate drift rather than sanctions. If you believe a flag is wrong you may, entirely at your discretion, provide context about the source of funds, which is forwarded upstream for reassessment; the upstream provider has the final say, and a refund remains available regardless. What you should not do is send identity documents unprompted — they cannot be used and will not be kept. The methodology page and the ChangeNOW comparison cover how much this policy differs between services, as does the FixedFloat comparison.
What to keep so a human can help you
There is no support desk for individual swaps, because there are no accounts to authenticate against. That makes the little you keep unusually valuable. Save these the moment you create an order:
- The order URL. The single most important item — it holds the order ID and token, and is the only place refunds and rate decisions can be actioned. Bookmark it before you send anything.
- Your deposit transaction ID. Proof you sent what you say, and the fastest way to establish where the funds are.
- The deposit address you were given. Confirms you paid the right order and catches address-reuse mistakes immediately.
- Your payout address, exactly as entered. Distinguishes a typo from a delay.
- The payout transaction ID once it exists. Your receipt, if the destination chain is slow to show funds.
Retention cuts both ways, and honestly so. Order records are deliberately minimal — pair, amount, deposit address, payout address, rate type, creation time — and are purged on settlement, with thirty days as the outer limit. That is good for privacy, and exactly why an old order cannot be reconstructed later. The transparency page lists what is stored and for how long. If the order page is unreachable and you still hold the ID and token, that is the material to send to contact.
Making the next swap boring
Most stuck swaps are decided before the first coin moves. A short pre-flight habit removes nearly all of them:
- Match the network, not just the ticker. Check the chain on both legs. This alone prevents the only truly unrecoverable loss.
- Send from a wallet you control. Never from an exchange — that avoids batching delays, fee-deducted underpayments and split deposits at once.
- Match the rate type to the chain. Fixed for certainty on fast deposit legs; float when depositing Bitcoin or Monero, where a ten-minute lock is hard to meet.
- Bookmark the order page before depositing. Not after. It is the only thing that is hard to recover.
- Check whether your destination needs a memo. If it is an exchange account, assume yes and verify. If it is your own wallet, it almost certainly does not.
- Test small on a new route. On a fast, cheap chain the test costs cents and proves the whole path works.
None of this makes swapping risk-free, and nothing here promises that every order completes. It means the failure modes are known, finite, and mostly preventable — and that the ones you cannot prevent end in a refund to an address of your choosing rather than a demand for your passport.
Related reading
- Crypto privacy and swap glossary — deep-link definitions for fixed rate, memo and mempool.
- Stablecoin chains compared — the guide that prevents wrong-network losses.
- Bitcoin to Monero and Monero to Bitcoin — the two slowest-confirming routes, start to finish.
- Lightning network swap guide — how to avoid the confirmation wait entirely.
- USDT to Monero — network selection across all five USDT variants.
- BTC to XMR swap page — the widget, pre-selected.
