BTC to ETH: Swap Bitcoin to Ethereum With No KYC

The clock on a BTC to ETH swap starts when your Bitcoin transaction reaches the network, and most of the wait is spent there. The deposit needs one to three Bitcoin blocks. Blocks come about every 10 minutes on average, but a single gap can be far longer or far shorter. Once the deposit has confirmed, most swaps finish within minutes.

Your wallet sets the Bitcoin fee, and it is paid on top of the amount you send. Miners charge for the size of a transaction, not its value, so a payment built from one or two coins costs less than one that sweeps up dozens of small ones. Coins held on a bc1 address also take less block space to spend than coins on an old address starting with 1.

If you send from an exchange account, the withdrawal may sit in that exchange's own queue before it is broadcast, and it leaves from an address that is not yours. Send from a wallet you control, such as Sparrow, Electrum or a hardware wallet, so the sender address you enter really belongs to you.

The ETH is paid on Ethereum mainnet to an address that starts with 0x followed by 40 hexadecimal characters. MetaMask, Rabby and a Ledger all give you one. Copy it from the wallet and paste it rather than retyping it. Many addresses mix upper and lower case letters as a built-in checksum, so a wallet that calls a pasted address invalid is telling you something: copy it again.

The same 0x address also exists on layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Base, and on BNB Smart Chain. That causes confusion after the payout. This pair pays on mainnet, so a wallet switched to a layer-2 shows a zero balance even though the ETH has arrived. Set the wallet to Ethereum Mainnet before you look. What is a layer-2? explains why the networks share an address format but keep separate balances.

Use a plain wallet address. A token contract or a multisig you have never tested with incoming ETH is not the place to receive a swap.

You don't need any ETH in the wallet beforehand. Receiving costs the receiver nothing, and the first payout can land on a brand-new address. From then on, the ETH you received is also the coin that pays gas on Ethereum, so every later action, such as sending, approving a token or using an app, spends a little of it.

If you plan to turn part of the ETH into an ERC-20 token, hold some back. Tokens such as USDT or USDC cannot pay their own transfer fees, and without ETH next to them they stay put until you top up. Gas is priced in gwei and changes through the day, so quiet hours cost less; how to avoid high gas fees has practical tips.

To check the payout yourself, paste your address into Etherscan. It lists the incoming transaction and the block it landed in, often before your wallet app has refreshed.

When you create the swap you give two addresses: the 0x address for the ETH and the Bitcoin address you send from. The second one only matters if something goes wrong. If a swap cannot be completed, the coins are refunded to the sender address you entered, so it has to belong to a wallet you can open. BTC refunded to an exchange's hot wallet can be slow or impossible to recover.

Keep two references: the swap ID shown after you create the swap, and the Bitcoin transaction ID from your wallet. The status page shows each step, and mempool.space shows how many confirmations the deposit has. If the deposit has confirmed and the status has not changed for a long time, write to support@ghostswap.io with both IDs. Sending the same BTC again does not speed anything up; it only creates a second deposit that also has to be sorted out.

Some people searching for BTC to ETH really want to keep Bitcoin's price while using Ethereum apps. That is a wrapped token, not ETH, and it is covered in the BTC to WBTC guide. If you want ETH itself, to pay gas, hold or spend, this pair is the direct route: you give up BTC and receive the coin Ethereum runs on.

Bitcoin is built to store and move value, and it does little else. Ethereum runs smart contracts, so most lending apps, stablecoins, token launches and NFT markets live there. To use any of them you need ETH, if only to pay gas. Swapping some of the BTC you already hold gets you that ETH without opening an exchange account.

Others want exposure to ETH itself. They hold both coins and shift between them when they think one is cheap against the other. That is a market call, and the rate on this page comes from aggregated liquidity from leading crypto markets and floats until your deposit confirms. Ethereum vs Bitcoin compares the two networks if you are weighing that up.

And sometimes the reason is plain: a contractor, a project or a friend wants to be paid in ETH, while your savings are in BTC.