Crypto Swap Infrastructure Explained by SwapSpace and SimpleSwap After Five Years of Partnership

Every successful crypto exchange depends on infrastructure that most users never see and ideally never have to think about. But behind the scenes sits an invisible network of liquidity providers, routing engines, APIs and fallback mechanisms working together in real time. 

Five years ago, self-custodial swap aggregator SimpleSwap and crypto exchange aggregator SwapSpace connected their infrastructure around a simple idea: the most reliable crypto rails route through each other. Shared liquidity and built-in redundancy help keep transactions moving when individual providers run into issues.

In this interview, Stefan, Head of Infrastructure at SimpleSwap, and Vasily, CBDO at SwapSpace, tell us what actually happens behind a crypto swap, why mature infrastructure depends on partnerships, and what both users and builders should look for when choosing crypto swap infrastructure.

Building crypto infrastructure through connection

U.Today: A user taps "Swap" and pictures one clean move from A to B. Behind it sits a web of providers most people never see. Where did routing through each other begin, and what did connecting your two systems make possible that neither could offer alone?

Stefan (SimpleSwap): It began with an integration ticket, not a strategy offsite. One day our quotes were suddenly standing in a lineup next to everyone else's, judged by strangers in real time. It was the healthiest thing that ever happened to our pricing. A comparison screen is a gym for your quoting engine: you get honest or you get skipped.

And yes, the structure sounds funny at first: we assemble liquidity from 20+ CEX and DEX sources, and on SwapSpace we're one row ourselves. That is simply how mature infrastructure looks. Each layer hides the complexity below it, so the user only ever sees one tap.

Vasily (SwapSpace): I like that analogy. Competition definitely made everyone better. But comparison alone isn't enough. In my opinion, routing began with fragmentation. Every exchange, whether centralized or decentralized, holds isolated liquidity. Routing emerged as the logical response: instead of forcing users to search across multiple platforms, you connect them.

When SwapSpace integrated its first providers, rate comparison became possible. Users no longer had to trust a single offer. They could actually see the market.

That's the atomic unit of value a crypto exchange aggregator provides.

Today, SwapSpace routes across more than 45 liquidity providers and supports over 3,300 cryptocurrencies. The user sees one clean move. The infrastructure sees a network.

U.T.: In crypto, 'partnership' is often just a logo on a landing page. What makes an infrastructure partnership actually load-bearing, the kind a user quietly relies on without ever knowing it's there?

Vasily: A load-bearing partnership is one where failure is not an option. It's not a logo but a dependency. Users never see the integration layer, API calls, or failover mechanisms. They simply expect the swap to complete. If they notice the partnership, something probably went wrong.

That's because users expect a seamless experience and reliable execution, and those are the principles we build around.

Stefan: Vasily is right: if users notice the partnership, it's infrastructure, not marketing. I think the easiest way to test whether a partnership matters is to unplug it and monitor. A logo partnership disappears without a trace; remove a load-bearing one, and users feel it within minutes. If losing your partner shows up on a dashboard, the partnership was real. 

Reliable infrastructure isn't built during product launches. It's built during outages, volatile markets, and unexpected failures. Those experiences shape how platforms evolve and determine what users experience every day.

What five years of crypto infrastructure teach you

U.T.: What's one principle you only started building around after something broke and taught it to you?

Stefan: The blockchain does not pause while you fix your integration. Early on, we treated a provider outage as a rare exception to handle by hand. Then reality corrected us: a deposit sent before a route died still arrives on schedule, to a system that suddenly has no plan for it. So we rebuilt around one rule: no swap is allowed to have a single point of success. Before we accept a deposit, the system already knows its second route. The user never sees any of this, which is exactly the grade we aim for.

Vasily: What Stefan describes is exactly how our thinking changed on the business side. Early on, we chased the best price from one provider. Then one day that provider ran into issues. Users didn't care why; their swap simply didn't go through. 

Today, we build in fallback options. The best route isn't just the one with the most favorable rate; it's the one that reliably gets the transaction completed. Shifting our focus from rate-first to reliability-first changed the picture. 

The lessons users never see are often the ones that matter most. Every completed swap reflects countless design decisions made long before the transaction ever begins.

What actually happens during a crypto swap?

U.T.: Follow one swap from the moment a user hits "Send." Once it crosses both of your systems, what actually happens that users never see?

Stefan: From the user's side, it's four small moves: pick the pair, paste the receiving address, send the crypto, watch one progress bar. Behind that bar, the quote already encodes a decision: which of our 20+ CEX and DEX sources executes this pair best right now. 

While your deposit collects confirmations, markets keep moving, so the routing engine keeps re-checking that choice; sometimes the route quietly changes mid-flight. Once the deposit is final, we execute and send the result straight to your address. There is no account to top up and no balance left behind. The user makes one decision. The system makes the rest of them. For most floating swaps, the estimate and the delivered amount match to 99.998%.

Vasily: Stefan covered the mechanics well. From our side, the interesting part is what happens before that route is chosen. The crypto exchange aggregator compares offers from 45+ liquidity providers, evaluates rates, estimated completion times, network support, and takes provider KYC requirements into account.

If conditions change during execution, fallback mechanisms keep the swap on track. The user simply sees: "Swap complete." What they don't see is the routing optimization that made that possible.

U.T.: What's the most common thing that goes wrong mid-swap that users never notice because it has already been handled?

Stefan: The classic one is route degradation between the quote and the execution. A provider pauses a pair, or depth thins out on the venue we planned to use; both fit inside the minutes a swap takes. The user sees the same calm progress bar while the engine reroutes to another source. And when something does surface, a human answers in about four minutes, around the clock. The best incident report is the one the user never had a reason to read.

The best infrastructure is largely invisible. Which raises an important question: if users can't inspect the code or architecture, how should they evaluate whether a crypto swap service is actually trustworthy?

How to choose a reliable crypto swap service

U.T.: Someone is choosing a crypto swap service today and can't read a line of code. What signals actually tell them it's safe and mature enough to trust?

Stefan: You don't need to read code; read behavior. Has the service survived more than one full market cycle? Anyone looks reliable in a bull run. We've been online since 2018 with 99.9% uptime, through every mood this market has had. If you want to test the platform, run the twenty-dollar experiment: send a small swap and check two things: whether the delivered amount matches the promise and how fast support answers a question. And look at who integrates the service: hardware wallets do due diligence a retail user never could. 

Vasily: I'd split that into two audiences. For users, Stefan's checklist is exactly what I'd look for. For founders integrating swap infrastructure, the criteria are different. 

No code reading required. A mature solution should offer broad blockchain coverage, access to multiple liquidity sources, and advanced capabilities like Private Sends, which help protect wallet addresses and keep sender and recipient separate on-chain, without requiring founders to build or maintain the underlying infrastructure themselves.

With SwapSpace, founders don't build liquidity themselves; they inherit the entire routing network. We manage provider updates, new chains, and fallback logic, so founders can focus on their core product. 

U.T.: ‘Self-custody' gets repeated like a slogan. In plain terms, what does it change for a normal person on a normal day, and what does it still not protect them from?

Vasily: Self-custody means you control the keys, so no centralized exchange controls your funds. On a normal day: you swap, the funds go from your wallet to the provider and back to your wallet. No intermediary holds them. What it doesn't protect from: you still expose your on-chain activity to the public ledger. Blockchain activity is publicly visible: anyone can see what you swapped, when, and from which address. That's the gap our Private Swaps addresses: not custody, but the visibility of on-chain activity.

U.T.: This year you introduced Private Swaps instead of simply talking about privacy. What did building it teach you about what users actually want?

Vasily: Users don't necessarily want "privacy" as a feature, but they do value having control over how their transaction data is handled and shared. Building Private Swaps taught us that privacy must be frictionless, with no extra steps, no toggle that adds complexity. The private route should be just another option, comparable side-by-side with standard quotes. Users choose based on what matters to them. That's what they actually want: control, not ceremony.

U.T.: Large swaps often make users nervous because of price impact or execution risk. What genuinely changes when liquidity comes from many connected providers rather than one?

Stefan: Two fears: moving the price against yourself and getting stuck mid-flight. Aggregation answers the first structurally. When your size executes across many sources instead of landing on one order book, the market absorbs it where depth actually lives; on a number of assets that keeps impact modest even at six figures. The honest boundary is this: on a thin altcoin, no router invents depth that doesn't exist; we simply find all of it that does. For the second fear, a fixed rate locks your price for 20 minutes while the chains confirm, and a large swap travels with a live order ID plus, at higher tiers, a personal manager.

While users judge infrastructure from the outside, founders integrating crypto swaps face an entirely different set of challenges.

What builders often underestimate about crypto swap APIs

U.T.: A founder wants to add swaps to their wallet or app without building liquidity themselves. What do they most often underestimate about that decision?

Vasily: Founders often underestimate what happens after the integration goes live. Getting a quote is easy. Getting the right quote, the one that consistently settles across changing network conditions, with fallback options when a provider fails, is much harder.

The other challenge is maintenance. Providers update their APIs, new blockchains are added, and routing logic constantly evolves. With SwapSpace API, builders connect to a single integration while the aggregation layer handles those changes in the background. Instead of maintaining dozens of exchange connections, they can focus on building their own product.

Stefan: I'd build on Vasily's point. The integration itself isn't usually the hard part, but operating it is. Before choosing a provider, ask the unglamorous questions first: how do stuck transactions surface? Who answers at night? More than 6,000 products run on our rails, and the happiest ones asked exactly these operational questions before signing.

U.T.: Not holding user funds is standard for aggregators today, but it wasn't always obvious. Was remaining non-custodial a deliberate decision from day one?

Vasily: Deliberate. From day one, SwapSpace positioned itself as a technical aggregator and routing interface, not an exchange. We don't hold, store, or control user funds at any point. That wasn't regulatory foresight; it was architectural honesty. If you're an aggregator, you aggregate. You don't custody. Regulation later validated the choice, but the decision was always about staying true to what an aggregator is.

Stefan: I'll resist claiming prophecy. In 2018, wallet-to-wallet was simply the most honest architecture: your crypto leaves a wallet you own and arrives at a wallet you own, with nothing parked at our place in between. There was no vault in the design, so there was never a vault to defend. The deliberate part came later and came repeatedly, every time a cycle offered seductive reasons to hold balances. Saying no, year after year, was the actual bet. Then 2022 graded everyone's homework, and our model had nothing to freeze. We didn't predict FTX. We just refused to build the kind of vault that could fail like one.

The industry's next challenge isn't simply adding more liquidity or supporting more blockchains. It's making increasingly complex infrastructure disappear into the background.

The next five years of crypto infrastructure

U.T.: You sit in different seats, so you probably weigh this differently. For surviving the next five years, does reliability of execution or depth of liquidity matter more, and where do your views actually diverge?

Vasily: Reliability and liquidity are two sides of the same coin. Without liquidity, there's nothing to execute. Without reliable execution, liquidity is just a number on a screen. The divergence is in emphasis: one side worries about having the route; the other worries about the route working. Both are right. The answer is widening the range of sources while building redundancy into every path.

Stefan: I agree you need both. But if you're asking me to choose, execution reliability wins, and it isn't close. Depth can be aggregated; that is literally our product. Dependable execution can't be rented from anyone: it lives in your own failovers and monitoring, in what your system does at 4 a.m. when a provider vanishes. 

Liquidity is the water. Reliability is the plumbing. You can buy water; plumbing you have to build. One bad execution loses a user forever; one mediocre quote loses a single swap. Over five years, that arithmetic decides who is still in the room.

U.T.: Setting aside your disagreement, what's one trend for the second half of 2027 you're both watching closely?

Vasily: I think privacy will become infrastructure rather than a niche feature. Users are increasingly expecting more control over how their on-chain activity is exposed, just as they already expect reliable routing and multichain support. 

That’s exactly why we introduced Private Sends — a privacy-preserving transfer option that helps protect wallet addresses and keeps the sender and recipient separate on-chain. It’s not a standalone privacy tool, but another routing option that fits naturally into the swap flow. By the second half of 2027, we’ll be watching to see which wallets and apps make this kind of infrastructure part of the default experience rather than an optional add-on.

Stefan: We're staring at the same horizon: the swap is dissolving into other products. Exchange is turning from a destination into a feature. Our infrastructure already runs inside 6,000+ products, from Exodus to hardware wallets like Tangem, where the swap happens right where the keys live. 

The front door of crypto is moving, and increasingly it's a wallet, not an exchange tab. Whoever supplies dependable rails behind those doors wins the era. That suits us fine; we've been rehearsing invisibility for eight years.

U.T.: Five years from now, what's one thing you each hope a user never has to think about again, because the infrastructure just works?

Stefan: Networks. I want the question "which chain is this token on, and what happens if I pick the wrong one" to die completely. Today it's still the most expensive mistake a self-custody user can make, because the chain does not forgive. In five years, choosing a network should feel like choosing a cell tower for a phone call: serious machinery that is somebody's job, just never yours. That trade is the entire point of infrastructure.

Vasily: I'd put routing on that same list. The user should never think about which provider has the best rate, whether the swap will settle, or who can see their transaction. They tap swap. It happens. The infrastructure handles the rest: liquidity sourcing, route optimization, privacy protection. Five years from now, that's the goal: the swap just works, and the user thinks about what they're swapping, not how.