What happens to your coins during the time between chains in a cross-chain swap

05 September 2026

Your coins are held by the swap service in a temporary wallet on the source chain until the corresponding coins on the destination chain are released to you. This is the unavoidable gap when no direct connection exists between the two blockchains.

Here is how it works in detail, following a typical peer-to-peer cross-chain trade without a bridge or a centralised account.

First, you send your coins to a deposit address that the swap service controls. That address is generated specifically for your order. The service watches the source chain for the transaction to confirm. Once the network confirms the deposit with sufficient blocks (to prevent a double-spend or a reorganisation), the service marks your coins as received. At this point your original coins are no longer in your wallet. They sit in the service's hot wallet on the source chain.

The service then needs to send you the equivalent amount on the destination chain. It does this from its own pool of coins on that chain. The service sends the destination coins to the return address you provided, and you receive them. Only after the destination transaction is broadcast and confirmed does the service treat the swap as complete.

The time between chains is therefore the interval between "source deposit confirmed" and "destination transaction sent." How long is that? It varies. On a fast chain like Solana, confirmation takes seconds; on Bitcoin, it can take ten to sixty minutes. The service typically adds a buffer of a few extra confirmations for safety. On average, the gap lasts anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.

During that gap, your original coins are not lost. They are not moving. They are held in custody by the service. The service has a matching internal ledger entry that ties your deposit to your order. No other user can claim those coins. The service's risk is that the destination chain might fail to confirm the outgoing transaction, or that the price of the asset changes drastically between the two confirmations. To protect itself, the service locks the exchange rate at the moment you create the order, so it bears the price risk, not you.

What if the swap fails? If the destination transaction cannot be sent (for example, the destination chain is congested or the return address is invalid), the service will eventually refund your original coins back to your source wallet. That refund goes to the address you sent from, minus any network fees. The refund process takes additional time, because the service must reverse the internal ledger entry and broadcast a new transaction.

The key point: your coins are never simultaneously on both chains. They move from your wallet to the service's source wallet, then later from the service's destination wallet to your destination wallet. The gap is a period of custody, not of transit.

If you want the full picture of how this fits into getting an asset from one chain to another without a bridge or a centralised account, read the hub page titled "Swapping crypto across chains." It explains the broader logic behind these temporary custody arrangements and why they exist.

Back to wrapped assets