How To Swap ETH for XTZ Without a Centralized Exchange.

Let’s say you are holding ETH or other assets on Ethereum and you see a great opportunity in the Tezos DeFi ecosystem, or some amazing artwork which is minted and sold on one of Tezos’ NFT marketplaces, and you want to swap some of your ETH to XTZ to join the action, what do you do?

The first thing that comes to mind is to send those funds to a centralized exchange like Binance, Kraken, Coinbase etc., swap them for XTZ and then withdraw those XTZ to your Tezos native wallet.

But what if you don’t want to go through the AML/KYC processes or if the exchanges don’t have support for your country/location? Or in general if you don’t want to deal with centralized exchanges? Is there a way to swap those assets to XTZ without the use of a centralized exchange?

The answer is yes! In this article we will see exactly that. I will show you 2 different methods you can use to swap your ETH to XTZ without using a centralized exchange.

Like always, please do your own research, and only try it out if you’re comfortable after doing your research.

Option 1: Temple Wallet “Buy (with crypto)” feature #

This option is ideal for people that have no XTZ at all in their possession as the process doesn’t require you to confirm any transactions on the Tezos side and you receive the XTZ in you wallet. Let’s look at the process in more detail.

Step 1: Open a Temple wallet

Temple Wallet is a Tezos native wallet very similar to MetaMask that you can download either as a web extention or a mobile app. Make sure you download it from the correct link and as soon as you have it installed and opened your wallet we can move to Step 2. Always double and triple check the link you’re using!

Step 2: Click the “Buy” button and choose the “Crypto” method

Once you have your new wallet set up, click on the “Buy” button

Then click “continue” in the crypto tab.

Step 3: Choose the pair and the amount you want to swap

Here you need to choose to “Send” ETH and “Get” XTZ. Then input the amount you want to swap and click “Top Up”.

(note the minimum and maximum amounts you can swap with this method are indicated here so make sure you choose an amount between those values)

Step 4: Complete the transfer and wait for the XTZ to show up in your Temple wallet

In the next page you will be given an Ethereum address where you should send the amount you have chosen to swap. Make sure you do it in one transaction. Note, there is also a time limit (45 mins) that you have to send the funds. In my case, I have chosen to swap 0.029 eth, so I’m gonna send that amount to the address I was given.

Once you send the ETH to that address and the transaction is confirmed, you will see this page:

From this point on, you just have to wait for the confirmation on their side and the exchange of the assets which as they state can take from 15 minutes to 2 hours to be completed. In my case and while doing this guide, it took ~10 mins for the process to be completed with the XTZ credited to my wallet.

That’s it, you now have successfully swapped your ETH to XTZ and you are ready to use them in any way you like in the Tezos ecosystem (with a warm heart, I welcome you to the Tezos ecosystem).

Option 2: Bridge your assets with “Plenty Bridge” #

This method is more ideal for people that already hold a small amount of XTZ as it doesn’t have minimum or maximum amounts that you can transfer, but the process includes some transactions/confirmations on the Tezos blockchain so you will need to have some XTZ to pay for the miminmal gas fee (even 0.1 xtz should be enough for everything).

Keep in mind that you could always use the first method to get a small amount of XTZ and then use the Plenty bridge for bigger amounts or different assets.

Also, with the Plenty bridge you can bridge WETH, USDC, and many other Ethereum tokens which means that if you are holding eth, you will have to swap them to one of the listed tokens before you bridge them over. For this guide I will use WETH which I got by swapping my ETH inside the MetaMask wallet using their swap feature. Let’s look into the bridging process!

Step 1: Go to the Plenty bridge and connect your Ethereum and Tezos wallets and choose the assets you want to bridge.

Once we have both our Tezos and Ethereum wallets set, we go to the Plenty bridge app and we connect both wallets. Then we choose the ‘Ethereum to Tezos bridge’. Then we select the tokens and the amount we are going to bridge and then click “Proceed”.

For me it looks like that:

Note: If you are planning to bridge big amounts of a token, it would be wise to first check the liquidity of that token on the Tezos side so that you can later swap it with small slippage. I will show you where you can swap them in step 4 of this process.

Step 2: Confirm the lock on Ethereum side

On the next page we need to click on “Approve”

Confirm the Approval in your Ethereum wallet

And then click “Lock” and confirm in your Ethereum wallet again.

Step 3: Mint the tokens on the Tezos side

Once the lock is successful, we will wait for 12 confirmations and 5 signatures which in my case took about ~5 minutes. Once they are complete, we click the “Mint” button.

Then confirm in our Tezos wallet (remember you will need a tiny amount of XTZ for gas here).

And that’s it! After about a minute the process should be completed and the WETH.e tokens should be in our Tezos wallet.

Step 4: Swap your tokens to XTZ

Now that we have successfully bridged our ETH to Tezos in the form of WETH.e tokens, the last step is to swap them to XTZ or any other token that we intended to use in the first place.

For the swap I would recommend using one of the Tezos dex aggregators like 3route.io or the Crunchy Aggregator as they are great tools that help you swap your tokens with the least amount of slippage possible. If you are interested to learn more about Tezos dex aggregators make sure to check out my “Dex Aggregators on Tezos” article.

Once you complete the swap, you are all set! You now have completed the whole process of swapping your ETH to XTZ without using any centralized exchanges and the XTZ are in your Tezos wallet ready to be used to buy awesome NFTs, or to get juicy APRs in Tezos Defi or in any way you want.

If you are new to the Tezos ecosystem, feel free to check the “Tezos Defi Map” and “Tezos Gaming Map” articles to learn about interesting DApps you can use!