Swaps

What is a swap?

It’s an exchange of a crypto asset for an equivalent amount of another one. It’s like money exchange (e.g. exchanging Mexican Pesos to Dollars) but with crypto.

Some main benefits of doing swaps are:

Getting access to a wider variety of tokens, with more than 2,000 available.
Getting early access to new tokens.
Getting a chance to get lower fees depending on the network.
It’s a secure transaction thanks to immutable smart contracts..

How can I do a swap?

You can do swaps (token exchanges) directly from your Bitso Web3 Wallet:

Open your Bitso Web3 Wallet home page and select the Swap button that appears at the center of the screen
You will find a calculator to input the desired token amount you want to exchange, as well as the token you want to receive
Confirm your transaction by reviewing the details, thus including slippage and fees.
After confirming, you’ll see an in progress receipt screen. Usually it will take a few minutes for the transaction to be completed due to the blockchain and network congestion.

Make sure you have compatible tokens to the network you’re connected to and enough funds to cover the Gas fees, whenever you do swaps.

What is a token approval?

A token approval is the process of your Bitso Web3 Wallet allowing a smart contract to move your tokens as part of a swap or a transaction with dApps (decentralized applications). This will usually happen once per each new token you want to interact with.

What does a pending transaction mean?

Most of the time, doing swaps in Web3 is not immediate; that’s why you will see a receipt-like screen with a “Swap in progress” message after you finish a swap.

Swaps can be delayed due to some of the following reasons:

A network overload or congestion due to a high demand of token sales in the blockchain
Smart contract execution time due to computational work overload
Gas price variations

Please keep in mind that although your transaction status is pending, you usually will have to wait only a few minutes. To keep track of further details of your transaction status you can always check the Etherscan or Polygonscan links shown in your Bitso Web3 Wallet activity list.

If any transactions take more time than expected, please do not hesitate to open a ticket with our Customer Support agents.

What does a failed transaction mean?

A failed transaction can be caused due to some of the following reasons:

Not enough funds to cover the transaction
A network congestion
An unexpected blockchain connection error
Sudden price changes due to slippage
Not enough funds to cover the Gas fee

For further details you can also open a ticket with our Customer Support agents.

What’s the difference between swaps and buy/sell crypto?

Although both imply a trade or an exchange, the main differences are:

When you perform a swap quotation, we'll be searching across many different DeFi partners for the best price available in the market for the selected pair of tokens; therefore, we can provide better prices and also a bigger variety of tokens.
Swap involves exclusively crypto conversions; while buy/sell crypto can also involve traditional currency (fiat) like USD, MXN or EUR through a service provider.
In swaps you'll have to pay for the gas fees of the transactions with your own tokens, most of the time it requires you to have the amount to cover the gas in the native token of the selected network (e.g. if you're performing a swap over Polygon Network you'll need some MATIC to cover the gas fees)

The main benefits of swapping tokens with Bitso Web3 Wallet are:

Getting access to a wider range of tokens
Lower fees as you'll have access to a variety of liquidity pools
Security through immutable smart contracts

Related articles