This is a promoted post, although the funds used in the review were our own. Read more in our Editorial Policy.
Please note: This review is based on swapping a relatively small amount of bitcoin cash for ethereum.
There’s a new crypto exchanger on the block, with Seychelles registered/Dutch based exchanger AltcoinSwap. There have been a number of these systems pop up over the years, and following a similar method to the old version of Shapeshift. While some of these platforms have gotten a bit more complicated over the years, Altcoinswap is offering a pretty simple and straightforward service, swapping one crypto for another.
The site itself is simple in design, and while it’s newly launched it definitely has a couple of issues related to links, with some links to the likes of the blog not there, and some of the pages going to an altcoinswap.info domain, but it looks like this is down to the site moving to the .org domain in the recent weeks. There’s pretty straightforward FAQs there, it says there is 24 hour support by email.
I had originally wanted to swap some bitcoin for eth, but a quick look at mempool showed there was quite a backlog on the bitcoin blockchain, so in the end I decided to swap some bitcoin cash. I had a look to see that the minimum was for a BCH to ETH exchange, and this was quite modest, just 0.0178153 bch which at time of writing was worth just over 8 euro, and quite a lot lower than some of the more established alternatives. I checked one which has a 0.09bch minimum, so AltcoinSwap is certainly an option for those of you looking to exchange smaller amounts. I couldn’t see an upper limit either. It also doesn’t have a registration or KYC requirement before you make a trade, simply visit the site, set up your trade and off you go.
The exchange works by linking with a number of exchanges and then finding a price. At time of writing, it supported over 200 different cryptos (full list at the bottom of the article) During my test, I did have a little price variance if I refreshed the page, with the price changing a couple of times, sometimes down, other times up by a couple of percent, although crypto prices were somewhat in one of those freefall days with pretty extreme volatility which could have been part of the cause.
There are two options available for you. The first is a market based exchange, where your value is determined at the time of confirmation of your transaction. The other is a fixed price exchange, although this didn’t seem to be working at the time I was trying. So I went ahead with a market exchange, choosing to send 0.05 BCH for 0.011ish ETH from the input fields on the homepage.
It then brought me to a pre-step page, where I filled in the destination ETH address I wanted to send the exchanged coins, and gave me an optional refund address in case there was an issue. I put in a bitcoincash address for this, which it didn’t accept, so I converted this to a legacy address which it accepted fine. The next screen asked me to confirm the trade and the price (so you’ll see the difference in screenshots as there was some time in between the steps on my side), after which it brought me through to the sending screen.
On this screen, it gave me a QR code and a bitcoin cash address to send the 0.05 (excluding miner fees) to. I fired up my Trezor and did this, and within a couple of seconds of the transaction being broadcast, the first tick changed to green. This was at 11.30. I went to make a cup of tea, and by the time I got back, everything was finished. The bitcoin cash block had confirmed 4 minutes after I sent my transaction, and from looking at etherscan I could see that the ethereum transaction was sent 12 minutes after I had sent my transaction. So pretty quick. They hadn’t cheaped out on fees either, as it was confirmed straight away in 15 seconds of broadcast, and I had the ethereum in my wallet.
So in recap, bar some issues with the website which can be resolved by updating a couple of links, it worked as intended. The process was easy to follow, so assuming you’ve got the knowledge to be able to send crypto into it, and have your receiving wallet set up on the other side you should be fine. In my case, a 12 minute turnaround time was pretty solid, but if you’re using another crypto with a congested blockchain at the time of the transaction, you could expect this to be longer. But I was pleasantly surprised at how it worked. So if you’re looking at swapping one crypto to another with a simple and easy to use platform without having to go through the rigmarole of setting up an exchange account, AltcoinSwap is a pretty solid option for you.
List of cryptos supported: Sun, 0x, 88mph, Aave, AdEx, aelf, Aeternity, Agrello, Aion, AirSwap, Algorand, All, Aragon, Ardor, Ark, Atomic, Axie, Axion, Balancer, BancorNetworkToken, Band, Basic, BEAM, Binance, Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Bluzelle, Bread, Cardano, Cartesi, Celer, Celsius, Chainlink, Chiliz, Cindicator, Civic, Compound, Cosmos, COTI, Crypto.Com, CryptoFranc, Curate, Dai, DAO, Dash, Decentr, Decentraland, Decred, DeFi, DIA, DigiByte, district0x, DMM:, Dogecoin, Dusk, Elrond, Enjin, Ethereum, Ethos, Evedo, Everex, Fantom, Fetch, Filecoin, FIO, Firo, Frontier, FTX, FunFair, Fuse, Gatechain, GNY, GoChain, Groestlcoin, Guarded, Harmony, Harvest, Hedera, Hermez, HEX, Hoge, Holo, Horizen, Huobi, HUSD, HyperCash, ICON, iExec, Internet, JUST, KeeperDAO, Kleros, Klever, Komodo, Kusama, Kyber, Lead, LGCY, Lisk, Litecoin, Litex, Loom, Loopring, Maker, MANTRA, Mask, Measurable, Metal, Mirror, Moeda, Monero, NavCoin, NEM, Neo, Nexo, NOW, Numeraire, Ocean, OKB, OMG, Ontology, Orchid, Origin, ORO, PancakeSwap, Paxos, Perlin, PIVX, Polkadot, Polkastarter, Polygon, Polymath, Populous, Power, QTUM, Quant, Quantstamp, Raiden, Ravencoin, Ren, Ripio, Ripple, Rocket, Secret, Serum, ShareToken, SHIBA, Siacoin, SingularDTV, SingularityNET, SIRIN, Solana, Sora, SparkPoint, stakedFIRO, Standard, Status, Steem, Stellar, stETH, Storj, StormX, Stratis, SUSD, SushiSwap, SwftCoin, Swipe, SwissBorg, Synthetix, Syscoin, Tael, TenXPay, Terra, Tether, Tezos, The, THETA, Travala.com, TRON, TrueUSD, Ultra, UMA, Unibright, Unifi, Uniswap, Urus, USD, Utrust, VeChain, Verge, Viberate, Vybe, Waltonchain, Waves, WAX, Wrapped, XIO, yearn.finance, YF, YFII.finance, Zcash, Zilliqa
