ShapeShift
6.6/10 total
Now a wallet-connect, non-custodial aggregator over DEXs and cross-chain protocols, governed by FOX token holders rather than a company. The history matters more than the current product page: after a 2018 Wall Street Journal report alleging it had processed roughly $9 million from suspected criminals, it imposed mandatory KYC on all users and delisted Monero and Zcash, and by its founder's own account lost the large majority of its userbase. It dissolved the US corporation into a DAO in 2021, dropped custody and KYC, and open-sourced the front end. The SEC settled unregistered-dealer charges against the former corporate entity in March 2024.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- Fully self-custody: you connect a wallet and the trade settles on-chain, so there is no deposit for anyone to freeze
- No account, no email and no verification to trade through the DAO app
- Front end is open source and mirrored over IPFS, so the interface is not a single point of failure
- Very broad asset coverage across more than fifteen chains, including Bitcoin and Monero-adjacent routes via THORChain
- The 2021 restructuring removed the corporate entity that could impose KYC, and the change has held for five years
Against
- Imposed mandatory KYC on its entire existing userbase in 2018 and delisted privacy coins; anyone weighing it should price in that this has happened once
- The former corporate entity settled unregistered securities dealer charges with the SEC in March 2024
- Every trade is a public on-chain transaction and the hosted front end sees your IP and wallet address
- No onion service and the app does not function without JavaScript
- The affiliate fee is inside the quoted rate rather than shown as a line item, so the real cost has to be measured by comparing output
Agent access 5/10
The app and its swapper packages are open source and can be driven programmatically by an agent holding a key, but there is no first-party hosted quote API documented for general public use.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
embedded in rate
No account fee and no explicit swap fee line; the DAO earns an affiliate share embedded in the routed rate, historically around 0.5%, with FOX holders able to reduce it. Because the fee is inside the quote, compare the output amount against another aggregator rather than trusting the fee label.
Specification
- Type
- Aggregator
- KYC policy
- No KYC
- Custody model
- onchain
- Account required
- no
- Assets
- 10000+
- Chains
- 15+
- Operating since
- 2014
- Jurisdiction
- none
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- yes
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.