Cross-chain swaps are particularly useful tools, allowing people to make use of tokens and coins they collect on one chain and spend on another. This translation of liquidity has been functional and an advantage for crypto-savvy probably since the beginning of more than one crypto token existing, basically when ETH and LTC showed up after Bitcoin. Today, there are all kinds of swaps, but most of them focus on the ether side of things, Bitcoin, or even DOGE. That said, everyone else is left to exchanges for translation, having to do a three step process of sell-sell-buy to get from one token to another.
For example, a typical path on Kraken would involve selling a home token for USDT, and then selling the same USDT for the desired second token. Why? Because that's how exchange pairs work based on underlying liquidity pools. If there's no liquidity, then the token costs an arm and a leg to exchange, which becomes trade fees on top of gas/exchange fees. Some crazy cases can add as much as 75 percent on top of the gas fees, leaving almost nothing in the new token.
The WAX-Banano Option
For smaller tokens like WAXP and Banano, pairs and easy translation don't easily exist. One could use exchanges, as described above, but those exchanges that have both of these tokens are few and far between, and then there are the fees added on too. Fortunately, there's an easier option.
Built as a basic web-page two-token swap, the Kuyumcu BAN-WAX Swap Tool is extremely helpful. Working either way from WAX to BAN or BAN to WAX, one simply enters their starting token address and destination, and the Swap does the rest of the work when the user presses the Continue button. The Swap process works very fast, typically in a minute or two at the longest.
If there is a glitch, which can happen sometimes, there is the option to have coins returned, cancelling the transaction (WAX to BAN direction). On the other hand, if it glitches the other way (BAN to WAX), user support help is needed with an email. Problems are resolved very quickly, and the longest an issue took for me was maybe 6-10 hours on the outside, depending on time zones etc. Again, glitches don't happen often; I've probably had one in over 50 uses so far.
Aside From Exchange, Why Else?
The value of being able to move comparable balances from one chain to the next can be significant. For example, of one is farming a good amount of token on one change, using that value may be locked without a good use case there. However, if the same value can be swapped for an equivalent on a chain where there are plenty of use cases, then it makes sense. It's really a win-win for both, since one change gets a lot of activity to provide utilization of the other. Is the traffic fairly distributed? I can't say. In the BAN-WAX case, at least for me, it's clearly a one-way direction into WAX where I have far more use for what I've farmed and connected in Banano. That said, without the swap, I could be looking at losing anywhere from 15-20 percent of value through exchanges, which was my previous situation.
There's no benefit to using a swap if you don't have the requisite tokens, but for those of us who regularly frequent both the BAN and WAX worlds, the Kuyumcu Swap tool is a really nice resource, no question.
