Delivery versus Payment on Stellar Mainnet

A Swap is a delivery-versus-payment escrow on Stellar. You — the maker — escrow the asset you are selling in an immutable contract and name what you want paid for it. A counterparty — the taker — settles it, and the two legs move in the same transaction: they pay you and receive the escrowed asset, or nothing happens at all. Nobody holds both sides at once, and no custodian is involved.

A Swap that names a permitted counterparty is an OTC Trade: only that address can settle it. A Swap that names none is an Open Offer: anyone holding the link can settle it. That is the only difference between the two shapes — the same contract, the same escrow, the same settlement.

The escrow guarantees atomicity and availability of your side. Once the Swap exists, the asset you are selling has left your account and sits in the contract, so a taker cannot pay and be left without delivery, and you cannot sell the same tokens twice. Settlement is one transaction: the payment reaches you and the escrow reaches the taker together, or the whole transaction fails.

It does not guarantee that anyone will ever settle it. A Swap is an offer, not a commitment from the other side — if no taker appears, the escrow simply sits there until you Cancel it or its expiry passes and it is Reclaimed. It also does not guarantee a price: the rate is what you wrote into the terms, and it does not move with the market. And it does not neutralise the powers an asset's issuer holds over that asset — see below.

Yes, and this is the one that surprises people. Set up your side before you create the Swap. If you are buying a Classic asset you must be able to receive it before the Swap can exist: the create wizard checks this and will not let you continue until you can. Where the only thing missing is your own trustline, the wizard adds a trustline step you must sign before the escrow is approved; where the issuer has not authorized you, or the account cannot hold the asset at all, the wizard blocks and explains what is missing.

The contract cannot fix this for you at settlement. It does open a trustline for the taker on the asset being delivered, so a taker who has never held your asset can still settle in one signed transaction. It cannot do the same for you on the asset being paid: opening a trustline requires that account's own authorization, and the taker is the only signer in a settle. A maker who cannot receive the buy asset has an unfillable Swap — every settle attempt fails on the payment leg — and its only exit is Cancel, which returns the whole remaining escrow.

Two separate things, and neither one is solved by a trustline alone.

On the sell side, the Swap contract itself has to be an authorized holder of the asset, otherwise the escrow cannot be funded. Only the issuer can grant that, and it happens out of band: the issuer calls

POST /v1/soroban/swaps/authorize

On the buy side, an Open Offer of an

AUTH_REQUIRED

All of them. Escrow and atomic settlement change who holds an asset; they do not change what its issuer can do to it.

AUTH_CLAWBACK_ENABLED

AUTH_REVOCABLE

A Swap protects you against your counterparty, not against the issuer of what you are trading. Read the asset's flags before you escrow anything, and treat a clawback-enabled asset as an asset you hold at the issuer's pleasure.

Two ways, and both can only ever pay the maker.

Cancel is yours: you sign it, at any time, for any reason, and the whole remaining escrow returns to your account. Reclaim is permissionless but only after expiry: once a Swap has expired anyone can trigger the return, and the funds still go only to you, so a third party can pay the network fee for it without ever being able to divert anything. What has already been settled stays settled — neither action unwinds a fill.

An expiry is required and can be at most 90 days ahead.

Yes. A Swap can carry your own brokerage: a recipient plus a maker-side and a taker-side rate, each at most 10% of the payment, collected in the buy asset on every settlement. The maker-side rate comes out of what you receive; the taker-side rate is added to what the taker pays. The recipient must be able to receive the buy asset — a recipient that cannot would make every settlement fail, so this is checked before the Swap is created.

Bitbond's service fee is a separate thing entirely, charged once to you at creation.

The name is shared; the mechanism is not. On the EVM side, Delivery vs Payment is a one-sided open sale: the owner funds a delivery token and anyone buys at a fixed ratio, with no bilateral settlement to speak of.

On Stellar the entity is a Swap, and it does both shapes. It can name a single permitted counterparty for a genuine bilateral OTC Trade, or name none and behave like an open sale. It settles partially and repeatably, it carries an expiry with a permissionless return afterwards, and it can pay a commission out of the payment leg. Nothing about a contract, an address or an audit carries across from the EVM feature — they are separate deployments on separate chains.