ChangeNOW has widened what was already a notable lead in non-custodial swap speed, according to Swapzone’s latest benchmarks.
A year after Swapzone’s mid-2025 test ranked ChangeNOW fastest among eight platforms—posting a median swap time of roughly 1.8 minutes—its 2026 report, Speed Benchmarks: Non-Custodial Swaps Comparison 2026, shows the gap exploding. Drawing on 150,000 completed transactions, Swapzone finds the market median for a USDT→ETH swap is about 45 minutes. ChangeNOW’s median for the same pair: under 60 seconds. That’s roughly a 45x advantage.
The difference matters. Crypto markets can move dramatically in minutes, so lengthy processing windows expose traders to slippage and execution risk: the rate locked at trade time can be very different from what lands in the wallet after 45 minutes. By contrast, swaps that settle in around a minute leave almost no time for adverse price movement—what you see is effectively what you get.
ChangeNOW credits the performance to infrastructure-level improvements, particularly optimized liquidity routing designed to compress execution windows. The results show up on high-volume pairs such as SOL/USDT and ETH/USDT, where ChangeNOW is consistently finalizing swaps before many competitors even confirm incoming deposits.
“At ChangeNOW, we consider speed to be a fundamental pillar of user trust,” said Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer. “Our goal is to eliminate latency as a barrier between traders and their funds to establish near-instant settlement as the new standard for the non-custodial industry.”
Swapzone’s 2026 benchmark underscores an industry still grappling with slow settlement on many platforms—and suggests that rapid, routing-focused engineering could define the next wave of competitive differentiation in non-custodial swapping.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
