You pressed confirm on a number, sent your coins, and the amount that landed in your wallet

was not the amount on the screen. Usually the gap is small. Occasionally it is large enough that

you go looking for an explanation and find nothing but a status page that says "completed."

The explanation is structural rather than sinister. The figure you saw was a prediction, and the

thing it predicted — what your coins would be worth at the moment they actually settled — had

not happened yet. Everything that decides the final number happens in the minutes after you

confirm, and most of those variables are not the ones the quote advertises. This article walks

through that interval: what the provider is doing, which decisions are yours, and which belong to

the chain.

The provider does four things you don’t see

Between your deposit and your payout, a swap provider runs a sequence, and each step

introduces a variable the quote could not have known about.

First it watches for your money. Deposit detection is automated and address-specific, and it has

a deadline: ChangeNOW's help centre states that each exchange's deposit address is

monitored by an automated recognition system for a fixed period, and that a deposit arriving

after that window "will not be recognized."

Second, it waits for confirmations. The same documentation puts it plainly — upon receiving the

required number of confirmations, the exchange begins. How many confirmations are required

is set by the provider and varies by asset, so there is no universal number to plan around. The figure that matters is the one shown on your own order page.

Third, it sources the other side of the trade. Providers differ here, and some publish the answer:

ChangeNOW, one of the exchange providers listed on Swapzone, states that it is integrated into

several cryptocurrency trading platforms and selects a rate at the moment of the trade. That

moment is not the moment you clicked. Fourth, it broadcasts your payout, which costs a

network fee on the outgoing chain.

A swap therefore pays network fees twice — once when you send, once when the provider

sends — and both are already inside the figure you were shown. Swapzone charges no

platform fee of its own and folds provider and network fees into each displayed rate, but the

transaction itself is executed by the provider you select, not by the comparison layer. What the

comparison shows you is what each provider is willing to commit to before you send. What

happens after that is between you, that provider, and the chain.

Fixed and floating are two different bets on the same delay

Choosing a rate type is not a choice between a good deal and a bad one. It is a choice about

who absorbs the price movement that occurs while the chain does its work.

Providers are reasonably candid about the trade-off. ChangeNOW's own documentation

explains that in its standard flow each transaction may carry its own rate because of market

movement and network fees, and that offering a fixed rate obliges it to "lay down a small

reserve" to absorb that risk — a reserve included in the rate you see at the start, with the fixed

rate consequently differing from the floating one.

That is the general shape across the category: certainty is priced. Some providers publish it as

a separate percentage per rate type; others fold it into the quote, where it is invisible. If you

cannot see a premium, the safe assumption is that it is inside the rate rather than absent. Fixed

rates are also conditional rather than absolute — providers that lock a rate generally attach

terms to the lock, including a window the deposit must arrive within and an amount that must

match the order. The practical response is to treat the first figure as one provider's answer

rather than the price, which is why Swapzone puts several providers' offers side by side: what

you are offered when you swap crypto depends heavily on which provider you happen to be

standing in front of.

Congestion is the variable nobody quotes

The provider decides how many confirmations it needs; the chain decides how long that takes,

and neither party controls the second half.

Two forces move it. The first is the fee you attached when sending. Bitcoin Wiki's

documentation on miner fees is direct about this: fee rate is the single most important factor in

how quickly a transaction confirms, and miners today select transactions by fee rate. The

second is timing you cannot influence. The same documentation notes that although Bitcoin

targets one block roughly every ten minutes on average, in the short run a block can arrive in

under a second or more than an hour after the previous one. Other chains have their own block

dynamics, but the principle carries: an average is not a schedule.

Congestion compounds this. ChangeNOW's FAQ lists an overloaded blockchain — too many

transactions waiting their turn — among the reasons an exchange runs long, and puts typical

completion at roughly five to thirty minutes, with a separate estimate of two to twenty minutes for

processing speed elsewhere on the same page. Read these as estimates rather than

commitments; the provider's own pages treat them that way.

This is where the rate choice stops being abstract. On a floating rate, every extra minute of

delay is extra exposure to price movement. On a fixed rate, the same delay is expiry risk,

because your quote window is running against a chain that does not know it exists.

Where deposits go wrong

The costliest outcomes are not rate movements. They are the moments a swap leaves the

automated path, because the manual path is discretionary.

ChangeNOW's troubleshooting documentation is a useful map of the failure modes, because it

states them without softening: deposits sent in the wrong currency, sent on the wrong network,

sent from a smart contract address, or sent without the required memo or destination tag. In

several of these cases the exchange, in the provider's own words, "will not be completed

automatically." Support can often intervene, and the same page says that in some cases the

exchange can be continued manually — but it also sets the limits explicitly: a full refund cannot

be guaranteed, and the process "could take an indefinite amount of time to complete."

That is honest disclosure, not a warning sign. It is also the practical difference between a

system that owes you an outcome and a team doing what it can. Recovery in that scenario

depends on how a provider handles refunds and how quickly its support responds — which is

why those are worth checking before you need them, not after.

What to check before you press confirm

Five things are visible in advance, and all five move the number that arrives:

● Which rate type you selected, and what conditions the provider attaches to the lock

● The length of the quote window, and whether your chain can realistically confirm inside it

● The network fee you are setting on the deposit — this is your lever, not the provider's

● The exact amount, network, and memo or destination tag

● What the provider publishes about late or mismatched deposits

Swapzone's partner pages track several of these dimensions across listed providers, including

how closely received amounts have matched estimates, refund handling, transaction speed,

support responsiveness, and how often a provider has requested KYC. Where a provider has

too little recent data, those fields show as unavailable rather than filled in — an absence worth

reading as information in itself.

None of this makes a swap predictable to the satoshi. It does make the difference between a

result you can explain and one you cannot.

Crypto transactions are irreversible and asset prices move. Nothing here is financial advice.