No KYC · No Registration · Both Directions
Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two assets almost everyone in crypto holds at some point, and moving between them is one of the most common swaps there is. Most guides send you to a centralized exchange: open an account, upload an ID, deposit, trade, withdraw. That is five steps and a compliance file for something a single transaction can do.
This guide covers both directions — BTC to ETH and ETH to BTC: why people make the swap, the four ways to do it, a step-by-step for the no-KYC instant route each way, what it costs, the mistakes that lose money, and when THORChain is the better tool. For the live rate, the BTC to ETH pair page and the ETH to BTC pair page carry a widget and a conversion table; this page is the explainer behind them.
The two chains do different jobs, so the reasons for moving between them are practical rather than speculative.
None of these need an exchange account. They need a swap, and there are four ways to get one.
Every BTC↔ETH swap goes through one of these routes. They differ on who holds your coins, whether you identify yourself, how the rate is set and what you pay.
| Route | KYC | Rate type | Fees | Time | Min amount | Custody |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No-KYC instant swap (Superswap) | None | Fixed or floating | ~0.5% in the quote + your network fee | 5–30 min | Set live by the widget | Yours at both ends; service holds for minutes |
| Centralized exchange (Kraken, Coinbase) | Full ID | Order book | 0.25–0.60% base tier + deposit/withdrawal fees | Minutes to trade, plus deposit and withdrawal waits | Low | Exchange holds funds while on platform |
| THORChain / cross-chain DEX | None | Pool price (slippage) | Protocol fee + outbound fee + slippage; varies with pool depth | 10–30 min | Effectively set by outbound fee | Non-custodial; funds pass through protocol vaults |
| Atomic swap / P2P | None (usually) | Negotiated | Network fees + counterparty spread | Hours to days | Depends on counterparty | Yours throughout |
Deposit BTC, sell for ETH on the order book, withdraw ETH — or the reverse. Trading fees are visible: Kraken Pro starts at 0.25% maker / 0.40% taker and Coinbase Advanced at 0.40% / 0.60% at the base tier, both dropping toward zero for very large traders. Less visible is everything around the trade: the ID upload, the deposit wait, the withdrawal fee, and the permanent record linking your Bitcoin address, your Ethereum address and your name. For frequent, large trading it is the cheapest venue. For a single swap it is the most paperwork.
You give a destination address, get a quote, send your deposit to a one-time address, and receive the other coin. No account, no email, no ID. The margin is built into the quoted rate — about 0.5% on a fixed quote — and there is nothing else to pay except the network fee to send your own deposit. The service holds your funds only for the minutes between deposit confirmation and payout. This is the route the rest of this guide walks through; the general no-KYC swap guide covers it across all pairs.
THORChain swaps native BTC for native ETH through liquidity pools, with no wrapped tokens. Most other "cross-chain DEXs" are not like this: they hand you a wrapped BTC token on Ethereum (WBTC or similar), an IOU backed by a custodian, not Bitcoin. That matters if the point was to hold real BTC. THORChain is non-custodial and no-KYC, at the cost of a wallet that supports it, pool pricing that moves with trade size, and fees that are harder to read than a fixed quote. More on when it is worth it below.
A direct trade with another person, through an atomic-swap protocol that settles both legs trustlessly or a P2P marketplace with escrow. Nobody ever holds your coins. The cost is time and liquidity: you need a counterparty who wants the exact opposite trade at a price you both accept, and BTC↔ETH atomic-swap tooling remains niche.
A swap is only as safe as the wallets at either end. You need one you control on both chains before you begin — never a wallet inside an exchange account.
Sparrow (desktop) gives full control of fees, coin selection and replace-by-fee — the features that matter when sending a deposit into a quote window. Electrum is lighter and equally capable. BlueWallet is the mobile choice; it supports replace-by-fee and shows fee rates in sat/vB. Generate a fresh receiving address for each ETH to BTC payout.
MetaMask is the default for browser DeFi. Rabby is the popular alternative with transaction simulation before you sign. For anything you plan to hold, pair either with a Ledger or Trezor so the keys never touch the browser. Receive the swap into the wallet's plain 0x account address.
The swap pays out native ETH, the coin that pays for gas — not USDT, USDC or any ERC-20 token, and not WETH. A fresh wallet with zero ETH cannot move anything until ETH arrives, so the first swap into a new wallet should be ETH, not a token. Going ETH to BTC, send ETH itself: an ERC-20 token sent to an ETH deposit address is a classic way to lose a swap. If your real goal is stablecoins, the BTC to USDT (ERC-20) and ETH to USDT (ERC-20) pairs exist for that.
Ethereum charges gas per transaction, paid in ETH and sized by the work involved; a plain ETH transfer is the cheapest thing on the chain. Bitcoin charges by transaction size in virtual bytes at a rate set by the mempool auction. Expect 1–3 Bitcoin confirmations on a BTC deposit (roughly 10–30 minutes, irregularly) and around 12 Ethereum blocks on an ETH deposit (a little over two minutes at 12-second slots).
1. Open the widget on the BTC to ETH page or the homepage. Set BTC as send and ETH as receive, and enter the amount. The quote shows the ETH you will receive with the margin already inside it.
2. Choose fixed rate unless you have a reason not to. Bitcoin confirmations take long enough that the market can move before your deposit is seen.
3. Paste your Ethereum address from MetaMask, Rabby or your hardware wallet. Check the first four and last four characters against the wallet screen. Use the account address — not a contract address, not an exchange deposit address.
4. Send the exact BTC amount to the one-time deposit address. Set the fee rate to at least what the mempool is clearing — at 1–2 sat/vB this has been a few hundred satoshis for a native SegWit send in recent months. Enable replace-by-fee.
5. Wait for confirmations. The order page tracks the deposit; once it has the required confirmations the swap executes at the locked rate and the ETH payout is broadcast.
6. Receive ETH. It appears in your wallet within a couple of minutes, and because it is native ETH the wallet can pay gas immediately.
Typical total: 5–30 minutes, almost all of it Bitcoin confirmations.
1. Open the widget on the ETH to BTC page. Set ETH as send, BTC as receive, and enter the amount.
2. Check gas before you send. This is the one cost you control in this direction. Gas swings within a day; if a tracker shows a spike and the swap is not urgent, waiting an hour is free. In quiet periods a plain ETH transfer on mainnet has been costing cents.
3. Paste your Bitcoin address — a fresh one from Sparrow, Electrum or BlueWallet. Native SegWit (starts with bc1q) is the cheapest to spend from later. Verify the characters against the wallet.
4. Send ETH — not a token — to the deposit address. From MetaMask this is a plain Send with ETH selected as the asset.
5. Wait roughly 12 blocks. The ETH deposit confirms in a few minutes; the swap executes and the BTC payout is broadcast.
6. Watch for the Bitcoin block. A broadcast payout that has not confirmed yet is not stuck; it is a normal unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction. Follow it on any explorer using the transaction ID from the order page.
Typical total: 5–30 minutes, most of it waiting for a Bitcoin block to include the payout.
Three numbers make up the real cost on any route: the exchange spread or fee, the network fee to send your deposit, and any fee to withdraw or move the result afterwards. Comparing only the headline percentage misses two of the three.
An instant-swap fixed quote carries roughly a 0.5% margin. Kraken Pro's base tier is 0.25% maker / 0.40% taker; Coinbase Advanced is 0.40% / 0.60%, and Coinbase's simple buy/sell interface prices a spread on top. Some exchanges advertise 0.1% at entry level; their withdrawal fees vary. For a one-off swap of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, an instant swap and a CEX round trip land within a fraction of a percent of each other once the withdrawal fee is added — and the instant swap has no account, no ID and no exchange holding your coins. For a trader moving six figures a month, a CEX's volume tiers win on price.
Bitcoin fees have been unusually low in 2026: the mempool.space recommended rate at the time of writing is 1–2 sat/vB at every priority level, and the median has sat near 1 sat/vB for three months. A native SegWit send is around 140 vB, so the deposit fee is a few hundred satoshis. Ethereum mainnet base fees in quiet periods have been a fraction of a gwei, putting a 21,000-gas ETH transfer at cents. Both spike — Bitcoin during inscription waves, Ethereum during launches — so check before you send. Neither figure touches the swap margin; they are what you pay your own wallet to broadcast.
A fixed quote locks the payout when you create the order. A floating quote tracks the market until your deposit confirms. On a BTC deposit, where 1–3 confirmations can take half an hour on a slow stretch, the market can move more than the entire margin. Fixed removes that variance; floating keeps it and is the better choice only if you expect the market to move your way. Fixed quotes have a time limit and require the exact deposit amount — send late or send less and the order is refunded or re-quoted.
THORChain is the one decentralized route that moves real Bitcoin to real Ethereum without a wrapped asset. It is operational in 2026 with BTC and ETH among its core pools alongside a growing list of native chains — including Monero, added in the 3.20 release covered in the THORChain 3.20 native Monero swaps post. You send BTC to a THORChain vault with a memo naming your ETH address; the protocol swaps BTC to RUNE and RUNE to ETH in its pools and sends native ETH out to you.
It is the better tool when trustlessness itself is the goal — no company anywhere in the flow — and you are comfortable with a THORChain-aware wallet. It is the worse tool when you want a fixed quote: your rate depends on trade size relative to pool depth, the outbound fee is set by the protocol, and the effective cost is harder to read in advance. For a routine swap in either direction, a fixed-rate instant swap delivers the same native coins to the same wallets with one number to check.
Yes, if you follow the basics: use a fixed-rate quote, send the exact amount shown, receive into a wallet you hold the keys to, and check the destination address on your wallet’s own screen. The service holds your funds only for the minutes between your deposit confirming and the payout being sent. The real risks are user-side — a wrong address or the wrong network.
Usually 5 to 30 minutes end to end. Bitcoin is the slow leg: the deposit needs 1–3 confirmations, and blocks arrive roughly every ten minutes but irregularly. ETH to BTC is the mirror image — the ETH deposit confirms in a few minutes, then you wait for a Bitcoin block to include the payout.
A no-KYC instant swap builds a margin of about 0.5% into the fixed quote and charges nothing on top except the network fee to send your deposit. Kraken Pro starts at 0.25% maker / 0.40% taker and Coinbase Advanced at 0.40% / 0.60% at the base tier, before deposit and withdrawal fees. For a one-off swap the totals land in the same range; the difference is the account, the ID upload and the exchange holding your coins.
Fixed for anything you want to be predictable: the quote is locked when you create the order, as long as the deposit arrives inside the quote window. Floating rates track the market until the deposit confirms. Because the Bitcoin leg can take 10–30 minutes, a fixed rate removes the largest source of surprise.
Yes. MetaMask, Rabby, a hardware wallet paired with either, or any Ethereum wallet whose keys you control. Copy the address from the wallet itself. Do not use a smart-contract address or an exchange deposit address as the destination.
Native ETH on Ethereum mainnet — the asset that pays for gas. Not WETH, not an L2 balance, not a wrapped token. If you need ETH on Base, Arbitrum or another L2, bridge it yourself after it lands.
The widget sets a live minimum based on current network fees, so a tiny swap that would be eaten by the fee is refused up front. There is no verification threshold: the same no-KYC flow applies whether you swap 0.01 BTC or 10 BTC.
When you want the swap executed by a decentralized protocol rather than a service, you are comfortable with a wallet that speaks THORChain, and the amount justifies the setup. For a routine BTC to ETH or ETH to BTC swap, an instant swap is simpler, quotes a fixed rate, and delivers the same native coins to the same wallet.
Fixed rate · 5–30 min · No account, no ID
Swap BTC → ETH → Swap ETH → BTC →Ready to swap? No KYC, no registration.
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