Crypto network fees explained: who pays what in a swap

Three network fees are involved in a crypto swap. Your wallet pays a network fee to send the deposit. A deposit fee comes out of the coins you send, and a payout fee comes out of the coins you receive; on xswap.to both are already in the estimate. Bitcoin prices a transaction by its size in bytes, not by the amount, and on xswap.to the BTC payout fee in a quote grows with the size of the swap.

The three fees in one swap

1. Your sending fee (gas). Your wallet pays it to the network when you send the deposit, in that network's coin: BTC on Bitcoin, ETH on Ethereum, TRX on TRON, BNB on BNB Smart Chain. It comes on top of the amount you send. xswap.to does not set it, and it is not part of the estimate.
2. The deposit fee. A network fee on the side you send, separate from your wallet's gas. It is charged in the coin you send and taken out of your deposit.
3. The payout fee. It covers sending the coins to your address. It is charged in the coin you receive and taken out of the amount you receive.

The deposit fee and the payout fee are already in the estimate the swap form shows. The rate floats, so the final amount can still differ a little if the market moves before your deposit confirms; floating rate explained covers that part.

An example: you swap USDT on TRON for BTC. Your wallet spends TRX to send the USDT, the TRON deposit fee comes out of the USDT, and the Bitcoin payout fee comes out of the BTC you receive.

Deposit fee vs withdrawal fee

On an exchange account, the withdrawal fee is what you pay to move coins out to your own wallet. A swap has no account balance to withdraw from, so the same cost shows up as the payout fee, taken from the coins being sent to you. The deposit fee is the matching charge on the side you send, in the coin you send.

Two practical points follow. Both fees come out of the coins in the swap, so there is no balance to fund first. And each order pays them once, so splitting one amount into several small swaps pays both fees several times.

Why Bitcoin fees can be high and grow with size

Bitcoin blocks have limited room, and transactions pay for that room by size. Fees are based on the byte size of the signed transaction, and the rate per byte rises as more transactions compete for the next blocks (Bitcoin developer guide). The amount of BTC moved does not set the fee.

Size depends on the inputs (the earlier coins a transaction spends) and on the outputs, and a typical input takes more room than an output (Bitcoin Optech shows typical sizes). A larger payment may have to combine several inputs, and each one adds size, which is one way a fee can grow with the amount sent. On xswap.to the BTC payout fee in a quote grows with the swap size, so a large swap can pay several times the figure in the fee table.

The same rule applies to your wallet. If it holds many small amounts, one deposit may have to spend all of them and costs more to send. A Bitcoin explorer such as mempool.space shows current fee rates. A low rate saves on the fee, but the deposit can stay unconfirmed for longer, and the swap only starts once it confirms. The guide on how long a swap takes covers timing.

Gas on Ethereum, TRON and Solana

• Ethereum: you pay for each unit of gas a transaction uses, at the base fee plus an optional tip, in ETH, and the base fee rises when blocks are full (ethereum.org). A token transfer runs contract code, so you need ETH in the wallet even to send USDT. Layer 2s such as Arbitrum One and OP Mainnet also charge in ETH, including a part for posting their data to Ethereum (Arbitrum docs, OP docs).
• TRON: a USDT transfer uses bandwidth and energy. If your account has no staked energy, TRX is burned to pay for it (TRON resource model).
• Solana: a base fee per signature plus an optional priority fee, paid in SOL (Solana docs).

On these networks the fee depends on the work a transaction does, not on the amount, so sending a large amount of USDT takes about the same gas as sending a small one.

How to read the fee tables

The site checks deposit fees, payout fees and minimums once a week and shows them in tables like these, each with the date of the check.

From our weekly check on Nov 7, 2026. Fees are in each coin's own units: the deposit fee comes out of what you send and the payout fee out of what you receive. The live estimate in the swap form is always current.

The columns are the network with the listing id, the deposit fee and the payout fee in the coin's own units, and the minimum. The minimum is for a swap into the coin in brackets, so the Bitcoin row shows the smallest BTC amount for a swap into ETH. Other pairs have their own minimum, shown on each pair page.

From our weekly check on Nov 7, 2026. Fees are in each coin's own units: the deposit fee comes out of what you send and the payout fee out of what you receive. The live estimate in the swap form is always current.

A coin on several networks, such as USDT, gets a row for each network in the check, sorted by payout fee with the smallest first. Compare the rows for the networks your wallet or exchange supports. Each figure comes from one sample quote, so your own quote can differ, most of all for large Bitcoin swaps. The fees page has these tables for the coins listed on the most networks, and each coin page, such as Bitcoin's, shows its own.

Ways to keep fees down

• Swap once rather than in several small parts, since each order pays its own deposit and payout fee.
• When the receiving side accepts several networks, compare their payout fees in the table. For USDT, the USDT networks comparison lists what else changes with each one.
• On Bitcoin, pick a fee rate in your wallet that matches how soon you need the deposit to confirm.
• Keep some of the gas coin in the sending wallet. On most networks a token cannot be sent without it.
• Check the estimate right before you send, because fees change between the weekly checks.

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