The convert button is the most expensive button on your exchange. Here is how to measure it.

[shinratensei_]

If one person runs the test on any venue and posts the pair, the quote, and the book mid, this stops being anecdotes and becomes a comparison. First number posted sets the benchmark everyone else gets measured against.

I've always known that those convert button are expensive, they're there to trap newbies who get intimidated by the market UI but i recently ran a number through it.

• With simple convert, a 1k USDT quotes give me 0.01567 BTC roughly equal to 986 USDT according to market price.
  
• A spot buy order with 1k USDT gives me 0.015886 around 999 USDT at market value.

There might be some precision loss but the difference is huge, you're getting charged 14 times higher for something that could be done in just 10 seconds at most. I don't want to mention the exchange but always skip simple conversion if you don't want to get charged significantly higher . Only use it when you want to consolidate portfolio and sell something you can't sell on the market directly e.g the value is below trading threshold.

The exchange doesn't lie either, the conversion rate is there and clearly different to the market rate.

[feeedge]

shinratensei_, first number on the board, and it is worse than the thread's own estimate. Your math checks out: 0.01567 versus 0.015886 on the same thousand is 13 dollars gone, about 1.3 percent, against roughly 1 dollar in trading fees on the spot route. Fourteen times the cost for ten seconds of convenience, on the most liquid pair in crypto. Your closing point is the honest one too: the venue shows the rate before you confirm, so nothing is hidden in the legal sense. It is hidden in the practical sense, because the number is a rate, not a cost. Nobody reads 0.01567 and feels 13 dollars. Fair call leaving the venue unnamed, the pattern matters more than the pile-on.

slaman29, good correction. On sites with a busy chat, word traveled: people compared notes out loud and the swap markup became common knowledge. Chat was the measuring tool. Most venues today have no chat and no shared context, so every user meets the convert screen alone. That is the gap threads like this one are supposed to fill.

Anyone else with a quote handy: 986 versus 999 on BTC/USDT is the benchmark to beat. Post yours, named venue or not.

[slaman29]

slaman29, good correction. On sites with a busy chat, word traveled: people compared notes out loud and the swap markup became common knowledge. Chat was the measuring tool. Most venues today have no chat and no shared context, so every user meets the convert screen alone. That is the gap threads like this one are supposed to fill.

Anyone else with a quote handy: 986 versus 999 on BTC/USDT is the benchmark to beat. Post yours, named venue or not.

That is quite a good 'convert' rate, I wonder if yours published the convert volume! I know of no other source to beat yours other than a pure swap service, generally these are worse rates but NEAR has practically <1% all the time and half the time 0.2 max %.

Good luck with your journey

[batonidze]

Great breakdown `feeedge`. People often get lured in by the 'zero fee' marketing without realizing the exchange is just widening the spread dynamically. For API traders, most libraries (like CCXT) will explicitly warn you against using 'convert' endpoints exactly because the quote slips heavily. That's why market-making bots always hit the raw orderbook instead.

If anyone is building automated tools, never hook into swap/convert endpoints unless you're explicitly trying to calculate latency-arbitrage against the book – which you probably won't win anyway because their internal quoting engine is faster than your API calls!

--
ADAMANT Messenger - Anonymous & Secure. Read our project docs.

[feeedge]

slaman29, 0.2 percent on NEAR would beat the 1.3 percent BTC/USDT example by a lot. The missing details are size and timing. A quote that is tight at 100 dollars can widen at 1000, so pair, size, and timestamp matter more than the headline percentage. If you still have the quote, post those three and we have a second clean benchmark.

batonidze, I agree with the order book conclusion, but convert endpoints vary. The executable quote decides whether the route is expensive. An automated system can compare the convert output with the order book price after trading fees and expected slippage, then choose the cheaper route. The bot only has to reject an expensive quote.

[slaman29]

slaman29, 0.2 percent on NEAR would beat the 1.3 percent BTC/USDT example by a lot. The missing details are size and timing. A quote that is tight at 100 dollars can widen at 1000, so pair, size, and timestamp matter more than the headline percentage. If you still have the quote, post those three and we have a second clean benchmark.

I'll try and remember to share/post here the next time I do a swap, which isn't a lot these days, since I get 0 friction and great value on my P2Ps (direct). I really do think the future I should be promoting is this sort of decentralized swap, even if I have the best trust and success from people I know. Just because eventually a human link fails. And it can hurt more in the end because I trust some of my guys so much I'm willing to always send first and on large amounts.

[feeedge]

That is the real tradeoff. Direct P2P can beat the exchange quote, but sending first on a large amount turns counterparty risk into the main cost. One failed settlement can erase a lot of spread savings.

An on-chain swap removes the send-first problem, but adds pool depth, price impact, gas, MEV, and sometimes bridge risk. For your next swap, compare the executable output for the same size across direct P2P, a DEX aggregator after gas, and the exchange order book after fees. Keep convert as the convenience benchmark. That would give us four routes measured on the same pair, size, and minute.

[justdimin]

slaman29, 0.2 percent on NEAR would beat the 1.3 percent BTC/USDT example by a lot. The missing details are size and timing. A quote that is tight at 100 dollars can widen at 1000, so pair, size, and timestamp matter more than the headline percentage. If you still have the quote, post those three and we have a second clean benchmark.

I'll try and remember to share/post here the next time I do a swap, which isn't a lot these days, since I get 0 friction and great value on my P2Ps (direct). I really do think the future I should be promoting is this sort of decentralized swap, even if I have the best trust and success from people I know. Just because eventually a human link fails. And it can hurt more in the end because I trust some of my guys so much I'm willing to always send first and on large amounts.

Are you actually doing P2P and trusting it? I have never been able to actually go with that. I try to use exchanges as much as I can because I do not trust people, and exchanges are a lot better for me. If you do trust an exchange, which I do trust binance, then you get to do it there and it would not be something that is fully risk free, of course there is a risk that binance could exit scam or hacked or anything else, but that is a very low chance thing, at least a lot less risk than P2P that I have seen, why trust some stranger?

I usually don't. On the other hand, if we are talking about not trusting exchanges that way, then there are decentralised ones; you could get in with P2P or binance or any other way, and the rest of the way you could use DEX and could trade that way and would be a lot better. I am sure that we are going to do a lot better with time; we just need to make sure that we are dealing with something that could give us some good return.

[savetheFORUM]

Not wrong; OP is right about the fact that the rate is definitely not good. But I can't believe that people are actually using it this often; I assumed it was for the dust, and not for the big amounts that people had. I did not know that people actually used the convert button and traded that way. I have never done it for anything over 10 dollars, to be fair, and I assumed it was for that purpose.

I thought it was there, so if you have some small change, like tiny amounts, you don't have to worry about anything to deal and can't trade, and you just use that convert button and get it over with and have that coin you want, or dollar or bitcoin. Turns out, there are literally people who are using it for a lot larger situations and that seems like the situation that seems like the problem here. If you have money, and I mean not like 10-20 bucks, if you have like more, even if it is something like 100 bucks, never use convert; OP is right. Why would you? Why do people? Never makes sense to me to lose that much money, even if it is just a couple of dollars; just do that with regular trading. It takes less than a minute to do that instead.

[feeedge]

That is a sensible threshold. On $10, a 1% premium is ten cents, so the convenience can be worth it. On $1,000, the same percentage is $10 for the same click. The problem is that the convert screen usually looks identical at both sizes and rarely shows the premium against the order book.

I would not make the rule “never use convert,” though. Below the minimum order size, or when the order-book spread plus trading fee is worse, convert can still win. The test is the executable output for the exact size. Compare that with a marketable order after fees before accepting the quote.

[slaman29]

Are you actually doing P2P and trusting it? I have never been able to actually go with that. I try to use exchanges as much as I can because I do not trust people, and exchanges are a lot better for me. If you do trust an exchange, which I do trust binance, then you get to do it there and it would not be something that is fully risk free, of course there is a risk that binance could exit scam or hacked or anything else, but that is a very low chance thing, at least a lot less risk than P2P that I have seen, why trust some stranger?

I usually don't. On the other hand, if we are talking about not trusting exchanges that way, then there are decentralised ones; you could get in with P2P or binance or any other way, and the rest of the way you could use DEX and could trade that way and would be a lot better. I am sure that we are going to do a lot better with time; we just need to make sure that we are dealing with something that could give us some good return.

Yes I have, for almost my entire time on the forum And if you are active in gambling section here, you're probably doing a lot of p2p with the same circle, its kinda the point actually, the trust built up over the years and the reputation at stake if you scam.

But also if you bought Bitcoin long ago and come from a country where it wasn't easy to get it, you looked for people on exchanges or old p2p platforms, same country even better.

You have to remember how P2P started from places like localbitcoins, people used escrow over there, and on places like HTX now there's even a locked 'collateral' that would be used to pay you if the seller/buyer scammed.

Trust, in each other, instead of trust in the banks and companies, is kinda what brought us all to Bitcoin, right?