Why SwapScope

CoinGecko and CoinPaprika will tell you what a coin is worth. They are good at it, and for most coins you should use them. SwapScope answers a narrower question: what atomic swaps actually settled at on the Komodo DeFi Framework networks, and how much of that you should believe. It is the only place that measures this market properly, and it shows its working so you can disagree with it.

Every price carries its age

A general aggregator publishes the last trade on a pair, undated. On a market that trades often this is fine. On one that does not, the number can be weeks old and nothing says so: at the time of writing, a major aggregator listed Litecoin against USDC on this DEX at $55 while the order book sat at $71, because $55 was simply the last time anyone traded it.

Here a price is live, recent, low confidence or stale, the age is printed beside it, and past 7 days nothing is published at all. The same 7-day boundary the aggregators use to delete a pair is the one this site uses to stop quoting it while keeping it on the page.

Volume that could actually set a price

A reference price is built from trades, and not every trade can carry one. A swap worth a few cents is real, and it is also not evidence of what anything is worth: at these sizes the fee, the spread and rounding are larger than the trade. So the methodology excludes a trade below $1 of notional value, along with swaps that failed and prices far enough off the market to look like an error.

SwapScope publishes what it measured and what it used, side by side, so the gap is visible rather than hidden. On these networks the gap is mostly size: the average trade is well under a dollar, so most of them are excluded and a small number of larger ones carry the price.

Those are today's numbers, read when you loaded this page. Nobody else has a reason to publish the smaller figure and everybody has a reason to publish the larger: venues are ranked by volume, and a coin's price is then weighted by it. That is how a price ends up set by whichever venue reports the biggest number, at a level no other venue agrees with.

Proof, not assertion

An atomic swap leaves two transactions on two chains, locked to the same secret hash. SwapScope looks for them. Each swap shows both legs, what was found, and the transaction ids, so you can repeat the check yourself. A leg is proven only when both payments were found on their own chains locked to one hash and the preimage that opens them was published on chain.

Where it cannot check, it says so and why, rather than leaving a swap looking as though a confirmation is pending. A chain with no server this site can reach is named on the status page, alongside how much of each chain's history was confirmed.

It tells you when it does not know

A USD price needs an outside reference, and outside references disagree. When they disagree enough that no honest figure exists, this site publishes none and says how far apart they were, instead of quietly picking one. The same applies to a market too thin to price: the page says what is missing rather than filling the gap.

A quiet market is still a market

Aggregators remove a pair after a week without trades. The orders are still resting on it. SwapScope keeps the market listed, shows the depth, and says plainly that it has no reliable price.

• GLEEC 6133: $273,395.72 of resting depth across 509 markets with no reference price.
• Komodo 8762: $76,826,739.97 of resting depth across 706 markets with no reference price.

That is depth resting across markets, not a pool anyone could take at once: a maker can quote the same coins in many pairs, and the orders behind those figures are often backed by the same funds. What it does say is that the orders are there and nobody is trading against them.

Whether that depth is worth taking is a separate question, and the two networks charge very different taker fees to find out. See how the two networks differ and what is currently resting on the books.

What it is not

SwapScope covers two peer-to-peer networks and the atomic swaps that settle on them. It is not a general price source, it holds no funds, executes no trades, and has no opinion on what anything is worth outside this market. Every figure here is a measurement with a stated method; where the method cannot reach, the page says so.

SwapScope is run by one person, who also makes markets on the GLEEC DEX. So it measures markets its operator trades in, and you should not have to take its word for anything. That is the reason for the design rather than an awkward footnote to it: the method is published in full, the volume the engine rejected is published beside the volume it used, every swap carries the evidence found for it on chain, and the API serves the same numbers this site renders so any figure here can be recomputed against them.

The methodology sets out every rule in full, including the ones that discard data, and the API serves the same numbers this site renders.