Security & Self-Custody

Custodial services take your crypto into wallets they control, hold a balance for you, and let you withdraw later. That convenience comes with counterparty risk: if the custodian is hacked, becomes insolvent, freezes accounts, or is compelled to hand over funds, your assets are exposed. TorrentSwap is built to avoid holding that position of trust in the first place.

When you use TorrentSwap, there is no wallet on the platform that stores your balance and no account that credits or debits funds. TorrentSwap acts as an interface and router: it prepares a quote, generates the on-chain deposit details for the underlying protocol (it routes through Chainflip and the SwapKit API), and shows you the expected receive amount and fees before you commit. The actual movement of value happens on the blockchains themselves, executed by those protocols, not by a company database.

The practical consequence is that TorrentSwap has nothing to lose on your behalf. There is no pooled hot wallet of user balances to be drained, and no account ledger to be frozen, because user funds are never sitting with the platform between swaps.

Every TorrentSwap transaction is a series of real blockchain transactions rather than internal bookkeeping. You send the asset you are swapping to a deposit address tied to the cross-chain protocol. The protocol then settles the swap across chains and sends the destination asset to the address you specified. Because each leg is an on-chain transaction, it produces a transaction hash you can look up on a public block explorer and verify independently.

This on-chain settlement is what makes the process transparent. You do not have to take a balance shown in a dashboard on faith; you can confirm that your deposit arrived and that the output was sent to your address using the same public ledgers that secure the coins themselves. Settlement times vary by network. Solana and Ethereum on Arbitrum tend to confirm quickly, while Bitcoin is slower because of its block times, so a typical swap completes in roughly ten to thirty minutes depending on the chains involved.

Before you confirm anything, the interface shows the exchange rate, the fees, and the amount you should expect to receive. Nothing moves until you send your deposit, so you always review the terms of the swap first.

A TorrentSwap swap needs only two pieces of information from you, and both are wallet addresses you control. The destination address is where the swapped asset is delivered. The refund address is where your original asset is returned if the swap cannot complete as expected. You are never asked for an email, an ID, a password, or a sign-up, because the addresses are all the protocol needs to route funds.

Because these addresses are the entire instruction set for the swap, they carry weight. The output of a swap goes to the destination address exactly as entered, and funds sent to a wrong or incompatible address on a blockchain generally cannot be reversed. TorrentSwap validates that each address matches the format of the correct network before you proceed, which catches many mistakes, but format validation cannot confirm that an address is truly yours. Confirm both addresses belong to wallets you control and are on the right chain.

Give the refund address the same care as the destination address. It is only used when something goes wrong, but when it is needed, it is the path your funds take back to you.

Cross-chain swaps can occasionally not complete: a market price may move beyond the acceptable range while your deposit is in transit, or a deposit may arrive in a way the protocol cannot fulfil at the quoted terms. TorrentSwap is designed so that these situations return funds rather than trap them. If a swap fails, your assets are sent back to the refund address you provided.

You also set a slippage tolerance when you swap. If the price moves unfavourably beyond that threshold before settlement, the swap is not forced through at a bad rate; instead the deposit is refunded to your refund address. This protects you from receiving far less than expected because of volatility during the confirmation window.

Refunds and outputs alike are on-chain transactions, so if you are waiting on funds you can track the swap status and look for the corresponding transaction hash on a block explorer. This is another reason a valid, correct refund address matters: it is the safety net for the small share of swaps that do not go through cleanly.

TorrentSwap requires no account creation and no KYC identity verification. There is no email to harvest, no password to breach, no uploaded ID document, and no stored profile linking your identity to your transactions. From a security standpoint, the safest data is the data that was never collected, and the design here deliberately keeps that footprint small.

This matters because data breaches are one of the most common ways crypto users are harmed, often indirectly. Leaked customer lists tie real identities to holdings and become targeting material for phishing, SIM-swap attacks, and extortion. When a platform never gathers that information, there is far less for an attacker or a leak to expose, and far less that could ever be requested or compelled from the operator.

Minimal data collection is not a claim of anonymity, and on-chain transactions remain publicly visible on their respective ledgers. What it means concretely is that using TorrentSwap does not create a personal-information honeypot tied to your swaps.

Self-custody puts meaningful control in your hands, and that control includes responsibility. A few habits prevent the most common losses:

These steps are the part of security only you can perform. Combined with a non-custodial model where funds are never held by the platform, they cover the parts of a swap that are within your control.