Guest post: How to Get the Best Swap

This is a guest post by the Bridges team.

Think you’re getting the best swap price? (You might not even know.) 

Today, there are more than 10,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation and dozens of major blockchains including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and others. But… that also means there are a lot of different places to make swaps. 

You can think of swapping as a commoditized service–a swap is a swap, just like a can of Coke is, well, a can of Coke. And while you may pay more for that Coke in a fancy restaurant or an inexpensive urban area, it’s exactly the same as one you find anywhere else.

Now, most of us don’t drink enough Coke to really care about price premiums, but in the world of crypto trading–where millions of tokens can change hands in a single transaction–those fees can add up quickly, taking gains right out of your pocket. 

Aggregators to the rescue

An aggregator pulls information from different places and adds value by making it available in a single place and in a more usable format. You likely use several of them every day, whether it’s for search results, retail price comparisons, travel itineraries, and more. 

Aggregators also exist in the world of crypto, and here’s how they work to help you get the price swap possible:

Let’s say you want to swap Token A for Token B. They both trade on the same blockchain, but you’re not sure how to get the best price on your transaction. In this example, an aggregator can show you where to get the lowest cost swap.

So what benefits do aggregators bring to the crypto ecosystem? 

1. Information: As we stated earlier, the essence of an aggregator is taking information from multiple places and combining that information in a way that adds value. By determining the price of swapping two tokens on different exchanges, aggregators make it easy for holders to find the lowest possible cost—thereby adding value to holders. 
2. Executing the Swap: Aggregators aren’t just information repositories. They’ll also execute the swaps that they find for you. (If you’re keeping track, that’s more value for holders.)
3. Aggregated Liquidity: Liquidity can best be understood as the ease with which two goods can be traded. By making it possible to swap tokens that trade on different exchanges, aggregators provide access to multiple liquidity sources at once that otherwise are fragmented and hard to find.
   

Here at Bridges, we’ve previously written on our blog about our plans of making Bridges Exchanges a hybrid DEX-Aggregator. So if you were wondering… Why this post and why now? Then let us clear the air: We’re actively working on building our multichain aggregator and plan to launch the first chain on November 5. 

Bridges won’t just find the best swap for you–it will tell you how much you’d save (or lose!) with each option, and it will execute the swap on your behalf.

Interested in other introductory and how-to content? Visit the Bridges Knowledgebase at https://learn.bridges.exchange/ to learn everything needed to get started in DeFi.