An aggregator exists to answer one question: of all the services that can do this swap, which gives you the best deal right now? That answer is only worth anything if the ranking is honest. It is easy to build a comparison site that quietly sorts by whoever pays the most commission and dresses it up as a recommendation. SwapScout is built on the opposite principle, and this is exactly how the ordering, the badges, and the labels are decided.
The primary sort is the amount you would actually receive. For a given direction and input amount, every eligible provider returns a quote, and we order those quotes from the highest output to the lowest. The number that decides position is the net amount that would land at your address, not a headline rate and not a pre-fee figure. When two providers tie on output, we break the tie by reliability and by measured historical speed, so a dependable, fast provider edges out an equal but slower one. At no point does the amount a partner pays us move a quote up the list.
We are direct about how we make money, because that is what makes the ranking trustworthy. Like every aggregator, we earn affiliate revenue when you use a provider through us. The key is that this revenue does not influence position. If a provider that pays us less offers you more Bitcoin, it ranks above one that pays us more. The only place commercial arrangements appear is sponsored placement, and sponsored offers are labelled as such, so you always know when you are looking at a paid position rather than an earned one.
Badges are earned signals, not decorations. The best-rate badge marks the offer with the highest output in the current list, and if several tie, they all get it. The fastest badge reflects measured average completion time, and we only show it once a provider has enough completed swaps for the figure to mean something, so a provider with a handful of lucky-fast orders cannot claim it. A privacy badge flags providers that do not require KYC. Each badge maps to a fact we can point to, not a marketing choice.
Honesty also means showing offers that cannot fulfil your request rather than hiding them. If your amount falls below a provider's minimum or above its maximum, we keep that provider in the list, clearly marked as out of range, and show you the limit. That way you can see the full landscape and adjust your amount to unlock a better offer, instead of being silently shown a smaller set and assuming it is everything available.
There is a deliberate restraint in how we present all this. We do not invent urgency, we do not fabricate scarcity, and we do not apply superlatives unless the data supports them. If there are too few offers to compare meaningfully, you simply will not see a best-rate or fastest badge at all. The list is meant to be read literally: the top is the most you can get right now, the badges are facts, and anything paid is labelled.
The reason for all of this is simple. An aggregator that games its ranking is worth less than no aggregator at all, because it costs you money while pretending to save it. By sorting on what you receive, breaking ties on merit, labelling paid placement, and showing the whole picture including the offers that do not fit, the ranking stays something you can actually trust, which is the only thing that makes it useful.