Inside the Trading Engine Behind ChangeNOW’s ‘Fast, Seamless Swaps’

Open Change NOW and a crypto swap seems like the simplest thing in the world: pick two tokens, send one, and receive the other — a process that the non-custodial exchange says is usually completed in minutes, across more than 110 blockchains, including ETH, BSC, and SOL.

It’s fast, streamlined – and according to Chief Strategy Officer Pauline Shangett – backed by layers of dedicated infrastructure, supporting more than 70 fiat options and more than 1,500 digital assets, with more being added every week.

ChangeNOW is “a commerce engine that many people can access at the same time,” Shangett said. The platform, she explained, acts as an intermediary between the user and a centralized or decentralized exchange, executing trades on the customer’s behalf “without the customer having to worry about things like the order book, transaction fees and complicated interfaces.”

That engine relies heavily on its own inventory. Shangett said ChangeNOW “operates primarily on our own liquidity when it comes to swaps,” price transactions based on exchange order books from which the liquidity comes, market data feeds such as CoinMarketCap, and an internal “liquidity engine” of wallets that hold balances for specific pairs. Depleting its own reserves, she argued, means that “network speed is not as big of an issue as it could be.”

In a recent one benchmark by swap aggregator Swapzone, based on 150,000 trades, ChangeNOW’s median settlement for a USDT to ETH swap clocked in at under a minute, versus an industry average of around 45 minutes.

Such comparisons will of course depend on the pairs and conditions tested, with ChangeNOW offering swaps for a wide range of tokens including meme coins, AI coins, DeFi, GameFi, stablecoins, privacy coins, DePIN and RWA.

Fiat currency support works through ‘trusted partners’ including Transak, Simplex, Banxa and Guardarian, allowing ChangeNOW users to buy crypto with Visa, MasterCard, Google Pay, Apple Pay, FasterPay, Sepa, Pix, ACH and Revolut.

New features

ChangeNOW has introduced a range of new tools that expand its offering beyond simple swaps. Private transfers route a transaction so that the sender’s wallet address and trail in the chain are not visible to the recipient, while still maintaining AML monitoring in the background. Users can also create a Permanent exchange address which provides a fixed, reusable deposit address that automatically converts any incoming crypto into a pre-selected payout coin, targeting recurring conversions.

Meanwhile a new one crypto payment link lets users set up a shareable link to request or accept payments in Bitcoin, stablecoins, and over 100 other assets. And one prediction markets hub brings together popular markets in crypto, politics, finance and pop culture in one place to track and compare.

Push it to the limit

Demand shocks are managed geographically. Shangett cited the 2021 Dogecoin frenzy, a Money liquidity crisis and the more recent launch of TRUMP tokens as stress tests. Because the team spans time zones, it can pre-position inventory, she explains. “We’re getting additional liquidity for that specific token for when US users wake up,” she said, adding that these increases occur as ChangeNOW “captures our transaction records.”

On sparsely traded or volatile pairs, Shangett said, “we actively manage liquidity to ensure stability,” so the platform sometimes imposes minimum or maximum trade sizes, although when minimum amounts are required they are “incredibly low,” ranging as low as $2. When Ethereum becomes overloaded, the solution is blunt: “adjusting network fees,” which she said ChangeNOW sometimes absorbs. During chain freezes, forks, or hacks, we “provide real-time alerts” that swaps on networks like BNB Chain or Solana may be slow.

The exchange is “proud” to point to its 4.6 rating on Trustpilot, based on more than 13,000 reviews, as proof that its approach works, while offering 24/7 support in case of problems.

That support structure includes an “L0” community team on social channels, “L1” handling chat and email tickets, escalating to L2 and then to L3 engineers “who are on call virtually 24/7,” Shangett said. Emergencies trigger “a rapid response protocol” that activates L3 and L4 engineers, but “most can be resolved by our compliance department or by L2 engineers.”

Future-oriented

When asked what she’s most proud of that isn’t reported, Shangett mentioned the platform’s cross-DEX bridging — “a lot cheaper and a lot faster than a traditional decentralized cross-chain bridge” — and its private transfers, which work for both B2B and B2C transfers, as well as in the platform’s self-custodial wallet, NOW Wallet.

“We’ve always been huge privacy nuts,” she says. “It allows people to send money to virtually anyone without changing their original wallet address, which can be critical for corporate entities or wealthy individuals, or simply for people who care deeply about their privacy. We’ve seen quite a lot of usage of this feature since its release.”

Simplicity is a work in progress, with Change NOW continually working to improve its offerings, Shangett said. Some of that streamlining is happening on the back end, with the exchange “enhancing our strong foundation to make it even better,” she said. The focus is on incremental improvements, she added, aimed at making the platform “a little bit faster, a little bit more optimal, a little bit safer and more secure.”