Why my swap shows as completed on the blockchain but the coins never arrived

07 September 2026

Your swap was completed on the blockchain, but the coins never arrived because the blockchain transaction you see only shows that you sent funds to the smart contract, not that the contract successfully delivered the other coins to your wallet. The transaction you checked is a "send" confirmation, not a "swap completed" confirmation.

Here is the mechanism. When you initiate a swap, your wallet signs a transaction that transfers your coins to the swap contract's address. That transaction gets mined, and a block explorer will show it as "completed" or "success" - meaning the transfer to the contract succeeded. The swap contract then receives your coins and attempts to execute the second half of the trade: purchasing the target coin and sending it to your wallet. That second step is a separate internal transaction or a series of contract calls. If that second step fails, the first transaction remains on the blockchain as a successful transfer to the contract, but you never receive the output coins.

Why does the second step fail? Several reasons are common. The liquidity pool for the target coin may have shifted between the moment you signed and the moment the contract executed. Slippage tolerance you set (or the default the site used) might have been too tight. The target coin's contract might have a fee, a transfer restriction, or a blacklist function that blocked the payout. The network could have been congested, causing the contract's internal transaction to revert due to gas price or gas limit issues. In all these cases, the public record shows your coins left your wallet and entered the contract - but the contract never sent anything back.

The coins you sent are now inside the contract. Whether you can recover them depends on the contract's design. Some swap contracts include a "refund" or "sweep" function that returns stuck funds after a timeout. Others do not. Some allow the contract owner to manually return funds. Many do nothing. You can check the contract's source code on a block explorer (if it is verified) to see if there is a function like withdraw, refund, or rescueTokens. If there is not, your coins are likely lost to that contract.

What your wallet signed during a failed swap is the key to understanding this. The hub page "What your wallet signs during a failed swap" explains exactly what permissions you gave the contract, and why those permissions do not guarantee a return transaction. That page is the natural next read if you want to trace the exact signatures and approvals involved.

In short: the blockchain confirmed you sent coins. It did not confirm the swap completed. The contract has your coins. Recovery is possible only if the contract has a refund mechanism. If it does not, the coins are unrecoverable. Do not send more coins to the same contract expecting a different result. Check the contract code first. If you cannot read it, ask someone who can. Most swap failures are not reversible.

Back to wallet security