BTC to PAXG: Swap Bitcoin to PAX Gold Without KYC

The token you receive, PAX Gold, is issued by Paxos and lives on Ethereum under the ERC-20 standard. Paxos says each PAXG is backed by one fine troy ounce of London Good Delivery gold held in vaults in London, and it handles redemption on its own platform under its own rules. On-chain, PAXG behaves like any other Ethereum token: it sits at a 0x address and moves with an Ethereum transaction.

Bitcoin holders use this pair when they want part of their holdings to follow the gold price instead of the BTC price, while keeping it in a wallet they control. Both assets still move in price, each for its own reasons, so treat the swap as a change of exposure rather than a step into cash.

The payout is PAXG on Ethereum mainnet. Nothing is wrapped and no bridge sits in between. Because PAXG is issued centrally, Paxos can freeze tokens at an address. That is a property of the token itself, and worth knowing before you hold it.

The deposit is ordinary BTC on the Bitcoin network. Send it from a wallet you control, such as Sparrow, Electrum or a hardware wallet, and enter that same bc1, 3 or 1 address as the sender. Bitcoin produces a block roughly every ten minutes, and the deposit needs one to three blocks before the swap moves on, so this side accounts for most of the wait.

Your wallet sets the Bitcoin network fee, paid in BTC on top of the amount you send. A very low fee rate can leave the transaction waiting in the mempool for hours. Pick a normal priority in your wallet, then follow the deposit on mempool.space.

Send exactly the amount the box shows, in a single transaction. Splitting the deposit across two transactions, or sending from an address other than the one you entered, makes a refund harder to match to your swap.

This is the step people miss. PAXG cannot pay its own transfer fee. Every move on Ethereum, whether to another wallet, into an app or back to a swap, costs gas in ETH. A wallet holding only PAXG can receive the payout but cannot send it anywhere.

Before or after the swap, put a little ETH at the same 0x address. If you have none, the BTC to ETH pair covers it as a separate swap. Paxos removed the on-chain transfer fee PAXG used to charge, so gas is now the only cost of moving it, and gas rises when Ethereum is busy.

If the balance does not appear in MetaMask or Rabby, the wallet may not list PAX Gold by default. Search for PAXG in the wallet's token list, or open the token's page on Etherscan and import it from there. Never copy a token contract from an unknown website or a direct message.

The fee row is the one to remember. On the Bitcoin side the coin you send pays its own fee. On the Ethereum side it does not, which is why the payout wallet needs ETH as well as PAXG. A Ledger can hold both sides at once, with the Bitcoin and Ethereum apps installed, so the sender address and the payout address can come from the same device.

The exchange box quotes the PAXG you receive after fees, using aggregated liquidity from leading crypto markets. The reference rate beside it is the market price of 1 BTC in PAXG before fees. The rate floats until your Bitcoin deposit confirms, so the final figure can differ slightly from the first quote. The pair's minimum and maximum appear in the box as well.

Once the deposit has its confirmations, most swaps finish within minutes, and Ethereum confirms the PAXG transfer in about 2 to 5 minutes after it is sent.

Nothing about you is collected for this pair: no account, no email and no ID upload. The swap uses the address that receives PAXG, the address you send from and the BTC deposit. If you already hold ETH and want gold exposure from that instead, ETH to PAXG works the same way with a single network.

If a swap cannot be completed, the coins are refunded to the sender address you entered. On this pair that is a Bitcoin address, so it should come from your own wallet, not a withdrawal from an exchange account, where a returned payment may never be credited to you.

Your swap ID opens a status page that tracks every step. The deposit shows on mempool.space by its transaction ID, and the payout shows on Etherscan as a token transfer to your 0x address. Look under the token transfers tab, not the main list of ETH transactions, because PAXG movements are listed there.

If the Bitcoin deposit is confirmed and the status has not moved for a long while, email support@ghostswap.io with the swap ID and the Bitcoin transaction ID. Sending the BTC again will not speed anything up. To return to bitcoin later, use PAXG to BTC.