ChangeNOW is widening its pace lead within the non-custodial swap market, with new benchmark knowledge exhibiting median settlement instances of underneath one minute—dramatically quicker than the trade median of roughly 45 minutes.
Seven months in the past, ChangeNOW was already pulling forward of the pack. Swapzone’s mid-2025 pace benchmark clocked the alternate at a median of roughly 1.8 minutes per swap: quick sufficient to say the highest spot amongst eight platforms examined. Its nearest rival, Changelly, trailed at round two minutes. Everybody else wasn’t actually within the dialog.
Now, the hole has widened to one thing nearer to a chasm.
Swapzone’s 2026 follow-up report, Pace Benchmarks: Non-Custodial Swaps Comparability 2026, attracts on 150,000 accomplished transactions to color an image of an trade nonetheless fighting an issue ChangeNOW seems to have largely solved. The market median for a USDT-to-ETH swap at the moment sits at 45 minutes. ChangeNOW’s median for a similar pair: underneath 60 seconds. That’s not a marginal lead, it’s a 45x distinction.
Crypto markets transfer quick, and each minute a swap sits in processing is a minute the value can transfer towards the consumer. A dealer who locks in a charge after which waits 45 minutes for settlement isn’t buying and selling out there they thought they had been coming into. The longer the window, the broader the potential hole between the quoted quantity and what really lands within the pockets.
ChangeNOW’s reply to this has been infrastructure-level. The alternate’s liquidity routing is optimized particularly to compress that execution window, and by the numbers, it’s working. On high-volume pairs like SOL/USDT and ETH/USDT, the platform is persistently clearing swaps earlier than most opponents have even confirmed the incoming deposit.
“At ChangeNOW, we contemplate pace to be a basic pillar of consumer belief,” mentioned Pauline Shangett, the corporate’s Chief Technique Officer. “Our purpose is to eradicate latency as a barrier between merchants and their funds to determine near-instant settlement as the brand new normal for the non-custodial trade.”
That framing, pace as a belief mechanism quite than only a comfort function, displays one thing actual within the knowledge. When a swap closes in 60 seconds, there’s nearly no window for the market to maneuver towards you. The speed you see is, in sensible phrases, the speed you get.
