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 permitted counterparties is an OTC Trade: only those addresses can settle it, and the list has no fixed ceiling. 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.

Yes, while the Swap is still open. The maker of an OTC Trade can add counterparties to it and can remove counterparties from it. Only the maker can do either. Adding carries a service fee for each counterparty added, and removing is free.

The list has no total ceiling. What is limited is how many addresses fit in one transaction, so a long list is signed as several transactions in a row: Token Tool tells you how many before you sign the first one, and shows you which ones have landed as you go. Each transaction that lands is final on its own, so stopping halfway leaves the Swap live with the counterparties named so far and the rest still to add.

The list always keeps at least one address. Removing the last counterparty is refused, because a named Swap nobody can settle reads as open while stranding the escrow until expiry — Cancel is the way to end an offer outright, and it returns the escrow in the same transaction.

Both changes take effect immediately, and neither touches what has already happened: a settlement that landed before the change stays settled, and a counterparty removed from the list keeps the asset they already took.

An Open Offer stays open. A Swap created without any named counterparty can never be narrowed to a list, so the public right to settle it cannot be revoked on the maker's word. A firm commitment keeps its one counterparty.

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, and only a firm commitment the taker has accepted binds 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 create transaction opens it. Where the asset requires issuer authorization, add the trustline in your wallet and have the issuer authorize it first. Where 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, once per asset: the wizard adds an Authorize the escrow step signed by the issuer's wallet, then you reconnect the selling wallet. On a firm commitment the contract also holds the taker's payment, so a restricted buy asset needs the same authorization, added as Authorize payment escrow.

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. Cancel is not available once a firm commitment is accepted. If a return cannot be delivered, for example because your trustline was removed, the contract holds it until you Collect it.

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. The recipient also cannot be the buy asset's issuer, since a Classic asset paid to its issuer is burned.

Bitbond's service fee is a separate thing entirely, charged to you when the Swap is created and again whenever you add counterparties to it.

The fee scales with how many counterparties you name. A Swap costs a base fee, charged in XLM inside the same transaction that funds the escrow, and that base covers the first counterparty. Every counterparty beyond the first adds a per-counterparty charge. An Open Offer and a Swap naming a single counterparty therefore cost the base fee and nothing more.

Adding counterparties later is charged the same way, per address, with no second base fee. A list long enough to need several transactions is charged per transaction as you sign each one, so stopping halfway means paying only for what landed. Removing a counterparty is free, and nothing is refunded for one you remove.

Settling, accepting, executing, cancelling, reclaiming and collecting carry no service fee at all, so a taker pays only the network fee and the price of the Swap. The current numbers are on the Token Tool pricing page.

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 list of permitted counterparties 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.