A swap, step by step
Every swap is a single transaction that you sign and broadcast from your own wallet. Pooled builds it, but it never touches your funds.
- Pick a pair and an amount Pooled asks its routing backend for the best way to get from the coin you hold to the coin you want. That backend is LI.FI, which compares dozens of bridges and decentralised exchanges and returns the best route it finds. Choose Best rate to optimise for output, or Fastest to optimise for settlement time.
- Connect your wallet The quote is then rebuilt for your actual address, because the transaction has to be constructed for the specific wallet that will sign it. The figure you saw before connecting is indicative; the one after is the one you can sign.
- Approve the token, if it needs it Sending an ERC-20 token means granting the bridge contract permission to move it first. That is a separate signature, and Pooled skips it when you already have enough allowance. Native coins like ETH need no approval at all.
- Sign the swap Your wallet shows you the transaction. Read it. When you confirm, it broadcasts from your address straight to the bridge contract. This is the moment the rate locks in.
- Watch it land Pooled polls the route's status every few seconds and shows you which leg it is on. A same-chain swap is usually done in seconds. A cross-chain one has two legs and takes longer.
Why there is no account
There is no sign-up because there is nothing to sign up for. Pooled has no deposit address, no balance, no ledger with your name on it. You are not sending funds to Pooled and waiting for Pooled to send funds back - your wallet interacts with the bridge contract directly, and Pooled is the thing that worked out which contract to call.
This is a real constraint, not a slogan. A service that takes your coins at a deposit address and promises to pay out at another is holding customer funds, which is a regulated activity in most places and a single point of failure everywhere. Pooled cannot freeze your funds, cannot lose them in a hack, and cannot be pressured into handing them over, because at no point does it have them.
The practical test: if Pooled went offline mid-swap, your transaction would still complete. It is already on-chain and in the bridge's hands. You would just lose the progress screen.
What you give up
Self-custody means the responsibilities are yours. You need a wallet and enough native coin to pay gas. You approve every step yourself. And if you paste the wrong receiving address, nobody can reverse it - there is no support desk with a database to edit, because there is no database.
Fees and rates
The Gas + fees line on the swap box is the all-in cost, already subtracted from the amount you are quoted to receive. There is no second bill at the end.
Why the number keeps moving
Quotes refresh roughly every 30 seconds because the underlying prices and bridge liquidity do too. The rate is fixed at the moment you sign, not at the moment you looked. The Min received figure is your floor: if settlement would land below it, the transaction reverts instead of filling at a bad price.
Wallets
Any injected EVM wallet works. That covers MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, Brave Wallet and the rest of the browser-extension family. Pooled asks the wallet to switch networks when a swap starts on a chain you are not currently on, and will offer to add the network if your wallet does not know it yet.
On a phone
Open Pooled inside your wallet app's built-in browser rather than in Safari or Chrome. Extension wallets do not exist on mobile, so a normal mobile browser has nothing to connect to. WalletConnect support is not wired up yet.
Receiving on Solana, Bitcoin or Sui
These are destinations, not sources. You can swap into them from any EVM chain, but you need to tell Pooled where the funds should land - paste the receiving address into the field under the swap box. For Solana, the Get address from wallet button will pull it from Phantom if you have it installed. Check the address before you sign; this is the one mistake that cannot be undone.
If your wallet warns you that a transaction looks unsafe or that it could not simulate it, stop and close the dialog. That warning is your wallet doing its job. Do not approve past it - come back, refresh the quote, and check you are on the right network with enough balance for gas.
Chains and coverage
Pooled routes across every network on the chains page, which is pulled live rather than maintained by hand. EVM chains can both send and receive. Solana, Bitcoin and Sui can currently only receive, because signing on those networks needs a separate integration that is not built yet.
Token coverage runs to tens of thousands of assets. The picker shows a curated list by default and searches the full set as soon as you type at least two characters, so if a token is routable you can find it by ticker, name or contract address.
Browse every chainWhen a swap is slow
A cross-chain swap has two halves. Your source transaction confirms quickly, then a bridge has to observe it and release funds on the other side. That second half is where the waiting happens, and it is normal for it to take minutes. Routes into Bitcoin routinely take twenty minutes or more, because Bitcoin blocks are ten minutes apart and bridges wait for confirmations.
Your funds are not lost
Once your source transaction confirms, the funds are in the bridge's custody and the bridge is obliged to deliver. Pooled tracking going quiet does not mean anything has gone wrong - it means this browser tab stopped watching. The swap continues regardless.
What to do
Keep your source transaction hash. It is the only thing you need, and every bridge and explorer will accept it. Pooled keeps polling for 45 minutes and then points you at the explorer. If a route fails outright rather than being slow, bridges refund to the sending address - that is the normal failure mode, and it is why signing from your own wallet matters: the refund has somewhere to go that belongs to you.
For a genuinely stuck route, go to the bridge that handled it. The route name is shown on the confirmation screen and in the status line. They run their own support and can see their own relayers, which Pooled cannot.
What Pooled knows
No account, no email, no KYC, and no analytics or advertising trackers on the page. Fonts and the background video are served from this domain, so loading Pooled does not hand your IP address to Google, a font CDN or anyone else.
What Pooled does see is unavoidable for a swap to work: to price a route, the chains, tokens and amount are sent to the routing backend, and to build a signable transaction your address goes with them. That is the minimum a router needs to do its job.
Be clear about what this is not. Blockchains are public. A swap links the sending address to the receiving address permanently and in the open, and anyone can read it. Pooled not collecting your data does not make your transaction private, and nothing here obscures the trail. Not asking for an account is a different thing from anonymity, and it would be dishonest to sell one as the other.
Routing goes through third-party bridges and exchanges that have their own policies and, in some cases, their own screening. Pooled does not control them, and you remain responsible for compliance in your own jurisdiction.