Promises you can hold us to

Here is the promise, word for word as we keep it in our own codebase. It is the sentence the entire product is organized around, so it gets a box.

Read it again and notice what kind of promise it is. It is not a promise about our intentions, our values, or how much we respect you as a valued customer. It is a promise about the order of operations. Screening happens first. The exchange happens second. Two outcomes exist and both are named. That is the entire trick, and it is a structural one, which matters because structural promises survive bad days, staff turnover, and growth. Promises that depend on a company feeling generous do not.

Concretely, the order of operations looks like this. When you create an order, the addresses on it are checked against risk and sanctions data before you send a single satoshi, so an address that would fail never even gets a deposit address to send to. When your deposit appears on-chain, it is screened again while the network confirms it, in the dead time you were going to spend waiting anyway. Only a deposit that has passed reaches the exchange leg. By the time coins are converted, the question every other service asks mid-flight has already been answered.

This is why we can say there is no third outcome. There is no moment in the pipeline where exchanged funds sit in limbo waiting for a compliance verdict, so there is nothing to freeze and no pressure point from which to demand your passport. We did not remove the freeze by being brave. We removed it by making it structurally pointless. The mechanism does not exist here, the way a submarine does not have a screen door problem.

To see why that ordering matters, look at what happens everywhere it is missing. The single loudest complaint about instant swap services, by a wide margin across review sites and forums, is this story: a service advertises no account, no registration, no KYC. You send your coins. The swap stalls. Then an email arrives asking for a passport photo, a selfie, and an explanation of where your money came from, and your funds sit with the service until you comply. The community has a name for it, shotgun KYC, a term formalized on kycnot.me, the directory the privacy crowd actually checks.

The reports around this pattern are worth stating carefully, because they are reports, not our own audits. Community reviews on kycnot.me describe frozen amounts that typically cluster in the low thousands of dollars, with one report alleging a loss in the hundreds of thousands. Search-indexed Trustpilot reviews describe similar seizures, and one widely shared review describes a mid-sized swap still unresolved after more than 150 days despite completed verification. At least one of the largest services openly confirms the mechanism in its own FAQ: an automated risk system with secret criteria, and a refund if you decline to verify, which users report can take weeks to arrive rather than the advertised day. On the regulatory side, the UK Financial Conduct Authority published a public warning about one of the most popular instant swappers in March 2025. None of this is gossip we invented. All of it is consistent, public, and easy to find once you know the term to search for.

The triggers users report are also consistent: a risk score from a chain-analytics vendor, coins that previously touched a mixer or a gambling site, anything involving Monero, amounts above a couple of thousand euros, a VPN plus a large swap, or simply a fresh wallet doing its first big trade. Normal people hit these triggers constantly, because normal coins have histories their current owner knows nothing about.

Here is the part we want you to actually take away: the services doing this are mostly not villains. They are companies that bolted compliance onto the end of a pipeline that was designed before compliance mattered to them. When you screen after the deposit arrives, a flag lands while you are holding someone else’s money, and at that moment freezing is the cautious move and the customer pays for it. The freeze is not a policy choice made by a cruel person. It is the natural failure mode of a bad ordering.

So we inverted the order. Screen first, exchange second, and the failure mode flips from a freeze into a refund. A deposit that fails screening here was never exchanged, so returning it is simple, automatic, and boring. We get no hold over you, and we never wanted any. That inversion is the whole company. The rest of this page is detail.

Trust dies fastest at the quote, so let us do the quote in public. Our pricing has two parts and zero footnotes. The spread is our margin: a flat 2%, applied to the mid-market rate in the open and locked the moment you create the swap, printed on the swap card next to the rate. The network fee is what it costs to send your payout on its blockchain, charged at cost and shown as its own line. That is the complete list. No deposit fee, no service fee, no withdrawal fee, no fee with a mysterious name that appears at the last step like a plot twist.

Percentages are slippery, so here is one full swap with the arithmetic visible. Every number in this table is an illustrative example with round pretend prices, chosen so you can check the math in your head. Live prices move; the shape of the calculation does not.

Two honest notes on those lines. The mid-market price we quote against comes from public market data, and the spread comes off it in plain sight; we do not pad the rate and then advertise zero fees, a trick we find genuinely embarrassing for this industry. Community side-by-side tests of swap services have reported effective spreads of several percent on quiet pairs, hidden entirely inside the rate. Ours is a flat 2% and it is printed. And the network fee is an estimate of the chain’s real cost at payout time, not a quiet second margin: when fees on a chain spike, that line goes up, and when they fall, it comes down.

One more behavior worth stating, because this industry has made it surprising. Your rate is locked the moment you create the swap, so it does not drift between the quote and the moment your deposit confirms. Whatever the market does while the network works through its confirmations is our problem, not yours: the rate you saw is the rate that settles, every time. The rate you see is the rate you get, and we carry the market risk so you never have to wonder which way it broke.

The honest framing is not what we promise to protect. It is what we structurally cannot know, because data that is never collected cannot leak, cannot be subpoenaed, and cannot be sold by anyone with worse values than ours. The left column is the complete inventory of what a swap creates on our side. The right column is what does not exist here at all.

Notice that nothing in the left column describes you, the human. Addresses and hashes describe coins. The one door through which a name can enter our systems is a support email you choose to write, and even there, an order ID is all we actually need. We will not perform the “we never see your IP” theater either: our servers keep ordinary access logs for about a week for abuse blocking and debugging, and then they rotate away. Every retention window, with the reason for each, is in the privacy policy, which agrees with this table line for line.

A trust page that claims no limits is lying somewhere, so here are ours, complete. There are three, and we would rather you read them here than discover one of them mid-swap.

The sanctions exception. If an address is on a sanctions list, the swap never begins, and in some cases the law also forbids returning the funds, because sending money back to a sanctioned party is itself unlawful in the places that matter to us. This is the one situation where “returned, always” can collide with a legal prohibition, and the law wins that collision. It is the single exception to the auto-return rule. Everything that is not sanctions gets the boring outcome: returned, minus the network fee, hash on the order page.

Underpaid deposits get a human, not an autopilot. If you send meaningfully less than your quote, we will not pay a full quote against a short deposit, so the order holds and a person looks at it. The outcome is one of exactly two things: the swap settles on the amount you actually sent, or the deposit is refunded under the normal policy. What never happens is the third thing this industry is infamous for, where the order page goes quiet and your coins are silently kept. Held for review here means a slower swap, never a missing one.

Unusually large flows may get a human look first. A swap far outside our normal size range may get a pre-exchange review by a person before it proceeds. Note the word order in that sentence, because it is the whole point: the look happens before the exchange, while the only money in motion is still yours to get back. The promise’s two outcomes still hold. The swap proceeds, or the deposit returns. A large amount can change the speed of the answer, never the set of possible answers.

One more thing that belongs under limits because honesty does: we keep no identity data and run no trackers, but order records and transaction hashes exist, and a valid legal demand for them will be answered. We are an exchange, not a resistance movement, and we will never pretend otherwise. What a demand can actually obtain is the short left column in the table above, which is the quiet advantage of collecting almost nothing.

Trust pages love the word infrastructure and hate specifics, so here are specifics. We run our own pruned Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Dash nodes on hardware we control. Pruned means the node keeps what it needs to fully validate new transactions rather than an archive of every block since genesis, which is the sensible trade for an exchange: full validation, smaller disk.

What that buys you is independence at the moments that matter. When your BTC, LTC, BCH, or DASH deposit confirms, the software saying so is ours, checking the chain’s rules itself, not a third-party API whose word we relay and whose outage becomes your stuck order. Deposit addresses for those coins come from wallets we run. Payouts broadcast from our own machines. And one less analytics-hungry intermediary sits between your transaction and our database, watching order flow.

The honest other half: the rest of our coins ride external RPC providers today. That is a normal way to run the long tail of chains, and the gateway validates everything it can regardless, but we will not pretend a rented connection is the same as your own node. Moving more coins onto our own hardware is on the list below, in the section where we keep our unfinished business. We are telling you which is which because vagueness here is how this industry hides its weak points, and the weak points are exactly what you deserve to see.

New services compensate for being new by claiming everything. We would rather compensate with a list of what is missing, kept in public, shrinking over time. Here is the current one.

Proof of reserves is coming, not live. If you use the optional wallet, your balance is money we hold for you. That is custody, it is a liability on our books, and we say so in those words. A published proof-of-reserves scheme, where you can verify that holdings cover balances without taking our word for it, is planned and not yet shipped. Until it ships, the honest statement is: wallet balances rest on our solvency and our word, and people who prefer not to rely on either should keep using the no-account swap, which holds your coins for minutes instead of months.

The legal entity is being formed. The operating company behind CoinVast is in registration now. The moment it exists on paper, its name, number, and jurisdiction will be published here and in the terms. We print an honest blank rather than a made-up letterhead, and you should treat any service whose letterhead you cannot verify with exactly the suspicion you are hopefully practicing on us right now.

More coins belong on our own nodes. Four chains run on our hardware today; the rest use external providers. Each migration makes deposit detection faster and removes a third party from the path. This list item gets shorter as disks and weeks permit.

Accounts stay optional, permanently. This one is a thing we will not build rather than a thing we have not: there will be no mandatory sign-up, no feature slowly walled off behind registration, no nagging banner that treats the no-account swap as a trial version of the real product. The swap without an account is the real product. The wallet is an extra for people who want balances and instant swaps between them, and it earns its users by being useful, not by being required.