What does "expired" mean on a crypto swap?
It depends which clock ran out. A swap has more than one, they expire at different times, and they do not mean the same thing. An expired quote means a price offer lapsed before you created a swap. An expired deposit window means a swap exists but its funding period closed. Neither is a statement that your coins are gone.
The word doing the most damage here is "expired" being used for both.
The seven stages, in order
Most confusion comes from treating these as one event. They are seven, and only two of them are deadlines.
| # | Stage | Is it a deadline? | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quote expiry | Yes | A price offer lapsed before you created a swap |
| 2 | Swap creation | No | The quote is used up and your rate is fixed |
| 3 | Deposit window | Yes | The period to send your payment for a created swap |
| 4 | Detection | No | Your payment has been seen on the network |
| 5 | Confirmation | No — a depth, not a timer | The network is settling it; the count only goes up |
| 6 | Processing | No | A person reviews the settled deposit |
| 7 | Payout | No | Your funds are sent |
Only stages 1 and 3 can expire. Stages 4 to 7 have no timer attached to them at all — a deposit does not become late because confirmation is slow.
Quote expiry
A quote is a price, held for a short window while you decide. On SwapToZec that window is short by default — well under a few minutes — because the price behind it is live and holding a stale one is a risk borne by whoever offers it.
The quote is consumed the moment you create the swap. It is deleted at that point and cannot be reused. That single fact resolves the most common worry:
Does my quote have to stay valid until my transaction confirms?
No. The quote's job ends when the swap is created. Once that has happened the rate is fixed on the swap, and the blockchain taking ten minutes or an hour to confirm does not disturb it.
If a quote expires before you create the swap, nothing has happened. No deposit address was issued, nothing was sent, and you request a fresh quote at the current price.
What happens when the swap is created
Three things, in order:
- The quote is consumed and the rate is fixed on the swap. It is not re-priced later.
- A deposit address is issued for your swap — and on some networks a tag, or a precisely adjusted amount, so your payment can be identified.
- A new timer starts: the deposit window.
That third point matters. The deposit window starts fresh at creation. Time spent reading the quote is not deducted from your time to fund, so creating a swap in the last seconds of a quote does not leave you with a truncated window.
The deposit window
This is the timer shown on the swap page. It governs broadcasting your payment — the moment you send — not the moment the network finishes confirming it.
That distinction is deliberate. If the window had to cover confirmation as well, it would have to accommodate the slowest plausible block, and a Bitcoin send during a fee spike could miss a deadline through no fault of the sender.
What if I sent before the timer ended but it confirmed afterwards?
That is the normal case on a slow chain, and the deadline is built for it. Once your deposit has been detected, the swap is no longer waiting to be funded, and the funding deadline no longer applies to it. Confirmation continuing past that deadline does not expire the swap.
What happens if you send after the window closes
Here the honest answer depends on the network, and you should be wary of anyone who gives you a single answer for all of them.
On Bitcoin, the destination stays associated with your swap after the deadline passes, and monitoring continues. A late deposit is still detected. It is not processed automatically at the fixed rate — it goes to review, where a person looks at it. That is the deliberate choice: the rate was fixed for a window that has now passed, so a person decides the outcome rather than software either processing it blindly or discarding it.
On the other networks, deposits are checked by a person rather than by automated monitoring — by design, not oversight. A late deposit there needs you to tell us about it. Contact support@swaptozec.com with the transaction hash.
What we will not tell you is that late deposits are always refunded or always recoverable. Outcomes depend on the asset, the amount, the address and how late it is. What the system guarantees is that a late Bitcoin deposit is seen and routed to a person rather than silently dropped.
Why sending again is the wrong move
This is the most expensive mistake available at this point in the process.
- The first payment may still be in flight. A transaction that has not confirmed has not failed. Sending again often means two payments arrive.
- Two deposits are a review case, not a double swap. They do not combine into one larger swap automatically.
- A second send on an expired swap compounds the problem rather than resolving it — you now have two payments needing manual attribution instead of one.
If something has gone wrong, keep the transaction hash and ask before sending anything else. The hash is the first thing any resolution needs.
"Expired" does not mean lost
Worth stating plainly, because the fear is common and mostly misplaced:
- Quote expired, nothing sent — nothing happened. Get a new quote.
- Swap expired, nothing sent — nothing happened. Create a new swap.
- Swap expired, payment sent on Bitcoin — detected, routed to review, a person decides.
- Swap expired, payment sent on another network — contact support with the hash.
- Sent on time, confirming slowly — this is normal. Wait.
The only case involving real risk of loss is one where the funds never reached an address associated with your swap at all — most often because they went out on the wrong network.
Related
For why the deposit figure has to match precisely, see why a swap asks for an exact amount. For what the confirmation count is actually measuring while you wait, see how on-chain confirmations work.