Seven months ago, ChangeNOW was already pulling ahead of the pack. Swapzone’s mid-2025 speed benchmark clocked the exchange at a median of roughly 1.8 minutes per swap: fast enough to claim the top spot among eight platforms tested. Its nearest rival, Changelly, trailed at around two minutes. Everyone else wasn’t really in the conversation.
Now, the gap has widened to something closer to a chasm.
Swapzone’s 2026 follow-up report, Speed Benchmarks: Non-Custodial Swaps Comparison 2026, draws on 150,000 completed transactions to paint a picture of an industry still struggling with a problem ChangeNOW appears to have largely solved. The market median for a USDT-to-ETH swap currently sits at 45 minutes. ChangeNOW’s median for the same pair: under 60 seconds. That’s not a marginal lead, it’s a 45x difference.
Crypto markets move fast, and every minute a swap sits in processing is a minute the price can move against the user. A trader who locks in a rate and then waits 45 minutes for settlement isn’t trading in the market they thought they were entering. The longer the window, the wider the potential gap between the quoted amount and what actually lands in the wallet.
ChangeNOW’s answer to this has been infrastructure-level. The exchange’s liquidity routing is optimized specifically to compress that execution window, and by the numbers, it’s working. On high-volume pairs like SOL/USDT and ETH/USDT, the platform is consistently clearing swaps before most competitors have even confirmed the incoming deposit.
“At ChangeNOW, we consider speed to be a fundamental pillar of user trust,” said Pauline Shangett, the company’s 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.”
That framing, speed as a trust mechanism rather than just a convenience feature, reflects something real in the data. When a swap closes in 60 seconds, there’s almost no window for the market to move against you. The rate you see is, in practical terms, the rate you get.
