BTC to XMR: Swap Bitcoin to Monero With No KYC

Most of the wait in a BTC to XMR swap is on the Bitcoin side. A new Bitcoin block arrives about every 10 minutes on average, but the gap between blocks varies a lot, and your deposit needs 1 to 3 of them before the XMR is sent. Once that is done, most swaps finish within minutes.

The Bitcoin network fee is paid by your wallet, not taken from the quote. It is priced in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), so it depends on how busy the network is and how many inputs your transaction has, not on how much BTC you send. That is why very small swaps lose a larger share to the fee. Before you send, check the current rates on mempool.space and pick a fee that gets into the next few blocks.

If you chose a fee that turns out too low, the deposit can sit unconfirmed for hours. Wallets such as Sparrow and Electrum let you raise it with Replace-by-Fee (RBF) or Child-Pays-for-Parent (CPFP); the swap continues as soon as the transaction confirms. The deposit address is an on-chain Bitcoin address, so a Lightning payment cannot reach it.

A Monero wallet gives you two kinds of address, both 95 characters long. Your primary address starts with 4. Subaddresses start with 8, and your wallet can make as many as you like, all paying into the same balance. For a swap, use a new subaddress each time, so two payouts can never be tied to the same address.

Copy the address from a wallet you hold the seed for, such as Feather, Cake Wallet or Monero GUI (compared in the best Monero wallets). Paste it, and check the first and last few characters after pasting. A 106-character address that also starts with 4 is an integrated address, usually given out by an exchange together with a payment ID. If you want the XMR in your own wallet, use your own address instead.

The payout first shows in your wallet as incoming or locked. Monero keeps every received output locked for 10 blocks, about 20 minutes, before you can spend it. That is a rule of the Monero network, not a hold by GhostSwap, and it applies to every XMR transfer.

If the balance is missing, let the wallet finish syncing first. A wallet restored from a seed only finds payments made after its restore height, so set that to a date before the swap. A block explorer cannot show your balance either: Monero hides the receiver, so only your own wallet can see the payment.

The Bitcoin address you send from is also the refund address. If a swap cannot be completed, the BTC goes back to it. That is why it has to be an address you control: BTC refunded to an exchange's withdrawal address may never be credited to your account.

Every swap has an ID and a live status page, and you can follow the deposit on mempool.space with its transaction ID. If the status hasn't moved for a long time after your deposit confirmed, email support@ghostswap.io with the swap ID and the Bitcoin transaction ID. Don't send the BTC a second time while you wait.

Atomic swaps are the most trust-minimised option, but they need software that stays online, offers are thin, and a failed trade has its own refund timeouts; how atomic swaps work covers the details. Peer-to-peer markets let you set your own price if you can wait for a match. A swap like the one on this page suits you if you want the XMR in one step from any Bitcoin wallet.

Every Bitcoin payment and balance is public. Anyone who links one of your addresses to you can follow what came in and where it went next. Monero hides the sender, the receiver and the amount of every transfer by default, so BTC moved into XMR stops showing up on a public ledger. Is Monero traceable? explains what that protects and what it doesn't.

Monero has also become harder to get. Many exchanges have delisted it in recent years (see the Monero delistings tracker), so swapping the BTC you already hold is now one of the simplest ways to get XMR. Others swap so they can pay merchants and services that accept Monero, or to hold part of their savings in a coin whose balances are not public.