P2P vs. DEX: How should you swap your crypto?

The OKX Wallet offers two powerful ways to swap assets: DEX and P2P. While both are easy and secure, they each come with different benefits. Let's dive into which one might be best for you.

What's a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) swap?

A decentralized exchange, or DEX as we call it, is the swap experience most familiar to OKX Wallet users. On a DEX, you can swap and bridge your favorite digital assets without wasting your time shopping protocols or exchanges. Instead, our powerful X Routing technology looks for the best prices and protocols for you, which helps a lot if you want to optimize your price execution.

In addition, you can use our DEX for placing limit orders and bridging tokens across your favorite blockchains. This powerful stack is available to users at no cost; we charge no platform fees for users to use the OKX Wallet DEX. Customers will only be charged gas fees and bridge fees when imposed by the protocols through which the swap was made.

What's a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) swap?

Peer-to-Peer, or P2P for short, is another way for OKX users to swap crypto. P2P allows you to swap assets with another party directly, rather than through an exchange. This is useful in cases where two parties have agreed to swap one asset for another asset at a set price for example.

With the OKX Wallet, P2P transactions are only crypto-to-crypto, but this functionality offers users the ability to buy or sell the digital assets of their choice against another one. They can also post their bids or asks on OKX's public marketplace, a simple browser for finding orders being offered up by other OKX users. There are no fees associated with P2P swaps on OKX.

Should I use P2P or DEX for crypto swaps?

DEX and P2P are two ways that users can limit their reliance on centralized exchanges. However, which one is best for you will depend on many factors.

DEX is generally best for...

• Trading on order books or automated market makers (AMM)

• Making frequent and expedient swaps between assets

• Bridging assets across chains

• Having orders fulfilled fast and with low fees

P2P is generally best for...

• People who prefer over the counter (OTC) style trading

• Users who want to trade or send crypto directly between each other

• Users who want to swap between assets at a specific price

• People who value minimizing fees and slippage as much as possible