SilverSwap.

SilverSwap is a self-custody decentralized exchange that prices and settles trades through automated liquidity pools instead of matching buyers with sellers on an order book. Every pair on SilverSwap — ETH and USDC, for instance — is backed by a pool that holds both tokens, supplied by liquidity providers who earn a share of the swap fee in return. When you swap, you are not trading against another person; you are trading against that pool's reserves, and the pool's own math sets the price you get. This is the same core design documented across automated market makers generally, and it is why a SilverSwap trade never waits for a matching order to appear.

Why the pool ratio sets the price

Most AMM pools, including the ones SilverSwap routes through, hold reserves of two tokens and keep their product roughly constant as trades happen. Buy more of one token and you remove it from the pool while adding the other, which shifts the ratio and pushes the price of the token you're buying upward. The bigger your trade relative to the pool's size, the more the ratio moves and the worse your effective price gets — a property usually called price impact. Reading through Uniswap's documentation on pool mechanics explains the same constant-product curve that underlies most AMM pricing today.

What liquidity providers supply

Liquidity providers deposit equal value of both tokens in a pair — ETH and USDC, say — and receive a share of every swap fee charged against that pool proportional to their stake. SilverSwap itself never holds a reserve of its own; the liquidity sitting behind each pair belongs to the providers who chose to supply it, which is also why pool depth varies by pair and why deeper pools absorb larger trades with less price impact.

Using SilverSwap starts with connecting a self-custody wallet — nothing is created on a server and no account or password exists. Your wallet signs every action, and SilverSwap only ever requests a signature for a transaction you can read before approving it. The interface itself has no access to your keys and cannot move funds on its own; every transfer requires your explicit signature in the wallet, the same standard any Ethereum wallet implements as described on ethereum.org.

Token approval, explained

Before SilverSwap's contract can pull an ERC-20 token out of your wallet for a swap, you must grant it an approval — a separate signed transaction that authorizes the contract to spend up to a specified amount. ETH itself needs no approval because it is sent directly with the transaction, but USDC and nearly every other ERC-20 does. A limited approval, scoped to the amount of the current swap, is safer than an unlimited one: it caps what the contract could ever move even if something in the approval chain were later compromised, and revoking an old approval you no longer use removes that exposure entirely.

Between the moment you submit a swap and the moment it confirms, the pool's price can move — other trades may land first, or the block you're in may simply take a few seconds to settle. Slippage tolerance is the maximum amount of that movement you're willing to accept; set it too tight and ordinary network timing can cause your swap to fail, set it too loose and a thin pool can execute you at a materially worse price than quoted. SilverSwap shows the expected output and lets you adjust the tolerance before signing, so the trade-off is visible rather than hidden.

Slippage setting	What it does	When to use it
Low (0.1%–0.5%)	Rejects the swap if price moves more than that before confirmation	Deep pools, major pairs like ETH/USDC
Medium (0.5%–1%)	Allows normal network timing to pass without failed transactions	Typical swaps on moderately liquid pairs
High (above 2%)	Tolerates larger price movement, including from your own trade size	Thin pools or unusually large swap amounts

Why price impact grows with size

Slippage tolerance protects you from price movement between signing and confirming; price impact is a separate cost that comes purely from the size of your own trade relative to the pool. A swap that is a small fraction of a pool's reserves barely moves the ratio, while a swap that is a large fraction of it can shift the price substantially in a single transaction. SilverSwap displays the estimated price impact alongside the slippage setting so you can judge, before signing, whether splitting a large trade into smaller ones would get you a better net price.

A SilverSwap trade is a single signed transaction, but what happens inside it depends on routing: if a direct pool exists for your pair, the swap goes straight through it; if not, SilverSwap routes the trade across two or more pools to reach the best combined price. Gas is paid in ETH to the network that processes the transaction, separate from the swap fee that goes to liquidity providers, and both costs are shown before you confirm.

• Connect your self-custody wallet and select the token you're swapping from and to.
• Enter the amount; SilverSwap quotes the output, the route, and the estimated price impact.
• Set your slippage tolerance, then approve the input token if it's an ERC-20 you haven't approved before.
• Review the final quote and gas estimate, then sign the swap transaction in your wallet.
• Wait for the transaction to confirm on-chain — you can verify the settled trade on a block explorer like Etherscan.

SilverSwap never takes custody of your funds, so the risks that matter are the ones you control at the moment you sign. Confirm the token contract address matches the asset you intend to trade, read the amount you'll receive against the amount you're sending, and check any approval before granting it.

Approvals and allowances

Keep approvals limited to what a swap actually needs, and periodically revoke allowances for contracts or tokens you no longer use. A wallet carrying fewer standing approvals has less surface for any single contract risk to reach.

The one rule that never changes

No exchange, wallet, or support channel ever needs your seed phrase. SilverSwap only ever asks you to sign a transaction that your wallet displays in full — it never asks you to type or paste your recovery words into any field, anywhere.

Once a swap settles, the output token is simply in your wallet — there is no separate withdrawal step because SilverSwap never held it. From there you can hold the asset, move it to another application, or run another swap through the same pools. Checking a pair's pool depth and recent volume on an aggregator such as DefiLlama before a larger trade is a useful habit, since it tells you roughly how much size a pool can absorb before price impact becomes significant.

A traditional order-book exchange matches your order against another trader's order at a price both sides agree to, which usually means custody passes to the exchange while the order sits open. SilverSwap settles differently: every trade executes immediately against a pool's reserves, at a price the pool's ratio determines in that moment, and your funds never leave your wallet until the swap transaction itself moves them. The trade-off is price impact on large trades versus the instant, custodial-free execution an AMM pool provides — for most everyday swap sizes, the pool model gets you a fair price with far less counterparty exposure than handing funds to a custodial order book.