Most cross-chain ZEC swaps cost more than they look, and the reason is structural, not competitive. Here is where the cost comes from, and why Zwap does not carry most of it.
The app is not the protocol
The wallet or DEX you click is a frontend. It routes your order to a settlement protocol and adds its own fee on top. That is why the market looks crowded: most “different” swap apps are the same protocol underneath.
NEAR Intents
Swap ZEC through Zodl, THORSwap, LeoDex, Trust Wallet, Ledger, or most Zcash-supporting frontends and you are almost certainly on NEAR Intents underneath. Its price is a stack: a 1 bps protocol fee, a solver spread, cross-chain MPC and bridge costs, and then your frontend’s affiliate fee on top. A frontend can only add to the protocol it rides on, never undercut it. And it is MPC custody: your asset sits at an address a roughly eight-node signer set controls and withdrawing still needs that set to co-sign. Worse for privacy, the swap lands on a transparent address, so shielding is a second transaction and a second fee.
Whatever your app charges, it charges on top of that floor. The benchmark below shows what that stacks up to in practice.
Zwap
Zwap is a peer-to-peer atomic swap. No liquidity pool, no vault, no wrapped tokens, no MPC set holding your keys. That is not a feature list, it is a subtraction. Every one of those things is a cost line in someone else’s quote, and Zwap does not have them to price in.
What is left is the only cost a swap actually requires: a solver spread and native gas. Zwap charges zero protocol fee. A solver takes about 10 bps to fill the other leg, and you pay the network cost of the source and destination transactions, which moves with each chain’s gas. That is the whole price.
- Zero protocol fee. Nothing is skimmed at the protocol layer.
- Solver spread of about 10 bps, plus the actual on-chain cost of the source and destination transactions.
- No slippage. There is no pool, so a large trade is priced the same per unit as a small one.
- No signer or vault overhead baked into the rate.
- No second transaction to shield. The ZEC leg lands directly in an Orchard note, private at settlement, not after a follow-up.
If a swap fails, your funds come back through a time-locked refund you claim yourself. No counterparty ever holds them.
The benchmark
We ran the same swap through every route on the same night, under the same market: USDC to ZEC, $10, on 9 June 2026 between 9:00 PM and 12:00 AM. The honest cost is not the quoted fee, it is the price you actually paid per ZEC, which is just $10 divided by the ZEC you received. That single number folds in the spread, the platform fee, and the gas.
| Route | Protocol / trust | Preview fee | ZEC received (per $10) | Real price (1 ZEC) | vs Zwap | Shielded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zwap | Atomic swap, trustless | $0.10 | 0.022637 | $441.75 | best | Yes |
| Houdini Swap | ChangeNOW (centralized) | $0.21 | 0.021600 | $462.96 | +4.8% | No |
| Thor Swap | NEAR Intents | $0.28 | 0.021400 | $467.29 | +5.8% | No |
| LeoDex | NEAR Intents | $0.29 | 0.021100 | $473.93 | +7.3% | No |
| Zodl | NEAR Intents | $0.05 | 0.021000 | $476.19 | +7.8% | Yes |
| Cake Wallet | Centralized exchanges | $0.39 | failed (2 tries) | — | — | No |
Zodl advertised the lowest platform fee in the test ($0.05, an order of magnitude under some rivals) and still came out the most expensive route to actually use, 7.8% worse than Zwap, because the spread ate everything the low fee saved. Zwap’s delivered the cheapest real price per coin, and it was the only trustless option that also settled shielded.
For integrators
None of this is a knock on the frontends in that table. They are doing right by their users, they are just capped by the floor they build on. That cap is the opening.
Zwap gives you a lower floor to build on: zero protocol fee, a solver spread of about 10 bps, and the source and destination gas, shielded at settlement, no MPC custody. Route your ZEC swaps through Zwap and you can keep your affiliate fee and still quote under a NEAR-routed competitor. Same integration work, a cheaper product, and a stronger privacy story to sell. Cheaper does not come from switching apps, it comes from the protocol underneath. Build on the cheaper one.