Anyswap Crypto Exchange Review: What Happened and Why It Became Multichain

When Anyswap launched in July 2020, it promised something most crypto users didn’t even know they needed: a way to swap Bitcoin for Ethereum without using a centralized exchange. No KYC. No custody. Just direct, peer-to-peer swaps across blockchains. For a while, it felt like magic. But by late 2021, the platform vanished under a new name-Multichain-and the original Anyswap exchange is now gone. This isn’t just a review of a service that’s dead. It’s the story of what went right, what went wrong, and why cross-chain tech still matters today.

What Anyswap Actually Did

Anyswap wasn’t a typical crypto exchange. You couldn’t buy ANY tokens with a credit card. You couldn’t deposit fiat. Instead, it was a decentralized cross-chain swap protocol built on Fusion’s DCRM (Distributed Control Rights Management) technology. That fancy term just means it let you trade tokens between blockchains without wrapping them or using a middleman.

Think of it like this: if you had 1 BTC on Bitcoin and wanted 35 ETH on Ethereum, you’d normally need to move your BTC to a centralized exchange, sell it, then buy ETH and send it back to your wallet. Anyswap skipped all that. You connected your MetaMask or Trust Wallet, picked your tokens, and the system used cryptographic key sharding to move value directly from chain to chain. No one held your coins. Not even Anyswap.

It worked with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Avalanche, Litecoin, and more. And it didn’t need a presale or venture funding. It launched on July 22, 2020, with $3.5 million in liquidity overnight. Within a day, it hit $7.79 million in daily volume. That’s rare in DeFi.

Why Anyswap Stood Out (At First)

Most cross-chain tools back then used wrapped tokens. For example, wBTC is Bitcoin locked up on Ethereum, represented by a token that’s supposed to be 1:1 backed. But wrapped tokens rely on custodians. If the custodian gets hacked or goes rogue, your wrapped asset is at risk.

Anyswap avoided that. It used Shamir’s Secret Sharing and MPC (Multi-Party Computation) to split private keys across nodes. No single node had full control. That made it more secure than bridges like Polygon’s PoS Bridge or RenBridge. Even Binance noticed. In October 2020, it gave Anyswap a $350,000 grant from its $100 million Accelerator Fund.

For experienced DeFi users, Anyswap was a game-changer. One Reddit user reported swapping 2.5 BTC for 50 ETH in a single transaction, saving $120 in fees compared to traditional methods. Another said they moved $10,000 from Ethereum to BSC without ever touching a centralized exchange.

The Downside: Liquidity, Speed, and Reliability

But Anyswap had a fatal flaw: it didn’t scale.

On February 26, 2021, its 24-hour trading volume was $1 million. Binance did $1.5 billion the same day. Anyswap’s liquidity pools were tiny. That meant high slippage. If you tried to swap $5,000 worth of ETH for FSN, you might end up getting 15% less than expected.

Transaction failures were common. During Ethereum network congestion, users reported three failed swaps in a row, losing $45 in gas fees each time. The system didn’t have a clear way to refund failed transactions. And customer support? Nearly nonexistent. On Trustpilot, 82% of negative reviews complained about slow or no responses.

For beginners, the learning curve was brutal. First-time users took 45 to 60 minutes to complete a swap. Many failed on the first try. Documentation was scattered across GitHub and the official site, and key details about cross-chain routing were missing. You had to understand gas limits, slippage tolerance, and blockchain-specific quirks just to get started.

What Happened to Anyswap?

By September 12, 2021, CoinMarketCap labeled Anyswap as an “Untracked Listing.” No volume. No data. No transparency. That’s a death sentence in crypto. A platform without tracked volume isn’t trusted. It’s ignored.

Then, on December 16, 2021, Anyswap quietly rebranded to Multichain. It wasn’t a simple name change. It was a full rebuild. The old Anyswap interface disappeared. The ANY token kept trading, but the original exchange was dead.

Multichain promised to fix everything: better liquidity, faster swaps, improved UI. But it didn’t. In July 2022, the Multichain Router v3 suffered a $120 million exploit. Hackers drained funds by exploiting a flaw in the multi-signature verification system. The platform lost credibility fast.

The ANY token hit an all-time high of $7.15 in January 2022, right after the rebrand. By December 2022, it was down to $0.85. Today, price predictions are all over the place-some say $14.55, others $3.20. No one knows.

How Anyswap Compared to the Competition

Here’s how Anyswap stacked up against similar tools at its peak:

Anyswap’s biggest advantage was its tech. But its biggest weakness was execution. THORSwap and Synapse had more liquidity and better user interfaces. Uniswap was simpler and faster. Anyswap tried to do everything-but didn’t do any of it well enough.

Is Anyswap Still Usable Today?

No. The original Anyswap platform is offline. The website redirects to Multichain. The ANY token still trades on exchanges like KuCoin and Gate.io, but it’s no longer used to access the original swap service.

If you’re looking for a cross-chain solution today, you have better options:

• Multichain - the successor, but with a history of exploits. Use with caution.
• LayerZero - newer, backed by major VCs, used by projects like PancakeSwap and Aave.
• Wormhole - popular for Solana-Ethereum bridges, used by major DeFi apps.
• Connext - focuses on fast, low-cost transfers between Ethereum Layer 2s.

Anyswap’s legacy isn’t in its platform. It’s in proving that cross-chain swaps without wrapped assets are possible. The problem wasn’t the idea. It was the team’s inability to scale, secure, and support it.

Who Should Have Used Anyswap?

Only three types of people should’ve used Anyswap:

1. Advanced DeFi users who understood gas fees, slippage, and blockchain congestion.
2. Token holders who needed to move assets between chains without trusting a centralized exchange.
3. Early adopters willing to tolerate failures for the sake of innovation.

If you were new to crypto, wanted to swap USDT to ETH quickly, or needed customer support when things went wrong-Anyswap was not for you. It was a tool for hackers, builders, and risk-takers.

Final Verdict: A Bold Experiment That Fell Short

Anyswap was never meant to be a user-friendly exchange. It was a technical experiment. And for a brief moment, it worked. It proved you could move Bitcoin to Ethereum without a middleman. That’s huge.

But crypto isn’t just about tech. It’s about reliability. It’s about trust. It’s about making things simple enough for real people to use.

Anyswap failed on all three. Its liquidity dried up. Its support vanished. Its user experience was a minefield. And when the exploit hit Multichain, the final nail was driven in.

The lesson? Innovation alone doesn’t win in crypto. Execution does. And Anyswap? It had the idea. It just didn’t have the stamina.