BTC to ARB: Swap Bitcoin for Arbitrum Tokens, No KYC

ARB is the governance token of Arbitrum One, an Ethereum layer-2 network. It is not the coin that pays fees there. Every transaction on Arbitrum One, including sending ARB onward, delegating its votes or using it in an app, costs gas in ETH on Arbitrum. That detail catches more people on this pair than anything else.

So plan for two balances, not one. The swap pays ARB to your 0x address. If that address holds no ETH on Arbitrum One, the ARB will show up but sit still until you add some. ETH on Arbitrum is listed as a separate coin in the exchange box, so a small second swap can cover it.

Bitcoin is the opposite case. BTC pays its own fees, so the sending side needs nothing beyond a bit of BTC for the miner fee. The gap between a coin that funds itself and a token that leans on another coin is what most of this page is about.

The payout goes to an address that starts with 0x followed by 40 hexadecimal characters. In MetaMask or Rabby, one 0x address serves Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum One and every other EVM network. That makes the address easy to get right and the network easy to get wrong.

This payout is made on Arbitrum One. If your wallet is set to Ethereum mainnet when you look, the balance will not appear, and it is easy to think the swap failed. Switch the network to Arbitrum One, and if ARB is not listed, look up the token on Arbiscan and add it.

Use a wallet whose keys you hold. An exchange deposit address may only credit ARB on networks that exchange supports, and you cannot control that from here. A Ledger connected through MetaMask or Rabby works fine as the destination.

Send from Sparrow, Electrum or a hardware wallet to the deposit address the box shows. The deposit needs one to three Bitcoin blocks to confirm, and with blocks arriving roughly every ten minutes, this is the longest part of the whole swap.

Your wallet sets the miner fee, paid in BTC on top of the amount. A very low fee rate can leave the transaction waiting in the mempool, so pick normal priority unless you are in no hurry. You can follow the deposit on mempool.space while it waits for a block.

Enter the address you send from as the sender address; bc1, 3 and 1 formats are all accepted. Sending from that exact address matters. It is the refund destination, and the box asks that the funds come from it, so a deposit from a different wallet causes needless trouble.

Of all six rows, the fee row matters most. BTC funds its own transfers, while ARB depends on ETH sitting in the same Arbitrum account. Most of the waiting happens in the left column, on Bitcoin; once the deposit confirms, Arbitrum One settles the payout in about a minute. Neither column has a memo or tag to fill in. For how layer-2 networks relate to Ethereum, the layer-2 explainer covers it in plain terms.

Some holders want a say in Arbitrum governance, where ARB is the voting token and can be delegated to a representative. Others want exposure to the Arbitrum ecosystem without first moving bitcoin onto Ethereum and bridging it over. This pair skips both steps: BTC goes in on Bitcoin and ARB comes out on Arbitrum One.

No wrapped bitcoin is created along the way, and you never hold a bridged asset. Be clear about what you end up with, though. ARB is a token whose value moves on its own, not a form of bitcoin.

The box quotes the ARB amount after fees, from aggregated liquidity from leading crypto markets. It floats until the Bitcoin deposit confirms; from that point most swaps finish within minutes. The minimum and maximum also show in the box. No account, email or ID is asked for at any point, because GhostSwap is a no-KYC crypto exchange.

If a swap cannot be completed, the coins are refunded to the sender address you entered. Here that means BTC going back to your Bitcoin wallet, so make the sender address one you control rather than an exchange withdrawal address.

Each swap has a status page under its swap ID, showing when the deposit is seen, when it confirms and when the ARB is sent; the payout transaction opens on Arbiscan. If mempool.space shows the deposit with its confirmations and the status page has not moved for a long while, email support@ghostswap.io with your swap ID and the Bitcoin transaction ID. Do not send the BTC again.

To turn ARB back into bitcoin later, use ARB to BTC. That direction is where the ETH-for-gas point bites hardest, because the ARB deposit itself cannot leave your wallet without it.