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Swap failures & refunds

A bridge-and-swap can fail at the exchange step — most often when the market moves during settlement and the AMM can't meet the swap's minimum-output amount. TeleSwap handles these cases by refunding the user rather than leaving funds stuck.

Failure states

A request's status reflects what happened (see the API Request object):

StatusMeaning
ExchangeFailedThe swap failed at the exchange step — the request will be refunded
FailedThe cross-chain request failed — the request will be refunded
WithdrawnThe refund has been returned to the user

The high-level state for these is Failed until the refund completes.

How refunds work

When the exchange can't be completed, the protocol falls back to delivering the bridged TeleBTC / BTC to the user instead of the failed target token, so value is preserved.

Avoiding failures

  • Fast swaps settle in ~10 minutes at close to the current rate — the Filler locks the rate in the moment it sees the request — cutting the price-movement exposure that causes most failures. See Fast Swaps.
  • Minimum-output parameters (e.g. minOutputAmount / minBtcAmount in the SDK) let you set your own slippage tolerance.

Tracking

Poll a request by TXID to watch it move through these states — see Status & history.