WRITTEN BY
Crypto copywriter
StealthEX instant crypto exchange hosted an AMA session with SwapSpace, a cryptocurrency exchange aggregator.
Host: Vadim Taszycki, StealthEX
Guest: Vasily Shilov, SwapSpace
Community Questions
Q1: What are the top 3 Spring 26 trends you’re seeing right now in the aggregator space? Is it AI smart routing, cross-chain liquidity irrigation, hybrid CX DEX models, or something else emerging from the conferences?
Vasily Shilov: I think it’s everything all at once, like the famous movie. Talking about 2026 and what I’m seeing from conferences, partner conversations, and the broader market, the first big trend is definitely privacy. Privacy is one of the main topics, together with no-KYC flows.
People are tired of being asked questions. Why should someone explain why they want to swap one token for another? We’re not banks. Imagine explaining to your bank why you want to withdraw more than $500 in cash. That’s the kind of thing crypto is trying to move away from.
Right now, more and more people want swaps with no registration, no KYC, and full privacy. I think that comes from people genuinely seeking freedom.
The second point is DEX access. Back in the day, only around 6% of the crypto audience traded on DEXs compared to CEXs. Then it moved to around 20%, and now we’re seeing something closer to 40–50% in terms of volumes.
Are Binance, Bybit, and other centralized exchanges dying? No, I can’t say that. But the market is definitely moving from “go to an exchange and swap there” to “swap directly from your wallet.”
In April, we added a couple of DEX partners at SwapSpace, and we’re also talking with wallets like Tangem, Cake Wallet, and CoolWallet. They are seeing this trend too.
The third thing is RWAs. At conferences, every second person was talking about real-world assets. The industry is growing fast, with the market going from around $5 billion to something like $24 billion over a five-year period.
We’re also adding RWAs, but honestly, it’s hard to say exactly where this market is going. Originally, it was about tokenizing real estate, tokenizing traditional stocks, and so on. But what comes next, only time will tell.
Q2: You’ve attended both. Ethereum CC and Paris Blockchain Week this spring. What surprised you most, and what confirmed your existing assumptions about where the market is heading?
Vasily Shilov: It’s not my first time attending conferences, but it was interesting to see how the topics are shifting. Some people stay, some people go, and I saw many familiar faces.
The vibe at EthCC in Cannes and Paris Blockchain Week was completely different.
EthCC in Cannes felt more relaxed. It was in the south of France, close to the beach, so the atmosphere was more chill. Still, there were a lot of brilliant people, big players, and side events. It was a huge venue with a lot happening.
Paris Blockchain Week was very different. That was a real surprise for me. There were many institutions, people from traditional finance, and bankers who had never even heard of swap aggregation. And this is 2026, so the market is still not saturated.
At EthCC, people were walking around in T-shirts, sunglasses, and company merch. At Paris Blockchain Week, everyone was in suits and shirts, and many side events were happening in restaurants or private institutional environments.
What confirmed my expectations was definitely the privacy trend. Regulations are coming. Most major exchanges have already left Europe, with only a few staying there.
Privacy was one of the most discussed topics. Inside our team, we had already been thinking about this for the last six months, and now the whole market agrees that privacy is a big topic. Regulations are coming, and it’s only a matter of time before projects have to apply certain changes.
Q3: MiCA is reshaping the European crypto market. Some platforms are hitting KYC, others are leaving entirely. Do stricter regulations actually protect users or just push them towards less transparent alternatives?
Vasily Shilov: The honest answer is that it depends on how the law is written and how it is applied. Sometimes on paper it’s one thing, and in real life it’s different. You need to be prepared for both.
MiCA is already changing the situation, especially in Europe. But MiCA is just one part of the new regulation.
Many players have to change their business models or leave Europe. This is especially hard for companies that are not major tier-one exchanges like Bybit or Binance. MiCA is closer to regulating banks than regulating crypto platforms or crypto exchanges.
The main paradox is that when big platforms start asking for KYC where they never did before, some users do not move to safer regulated platforms. Instead, they go into gray areas where there is less regulation but more scam risk. So regulation creates a different kind of risk.
Can we remove it? No, we can’t, because it’s hard to push back against governments.
For SwapSpace, this wave is not hitting us that hard because, since 2019, we have not held user funds, and we have not forced users to identify themselves. But for some players on the market, it can definitely be a killing shot.
Under MiCA, aggregators using non-custodial functions fall into a slightly different regulatory category. We are still working with partners that may need to apply MiCA, or partners that want to work with us, but in some cases, we cannot work with them because they are registered in Europe, and the ground is shaky right now.
When the situation is difficult, and you don’t know how to address it, I usually say: Guys, have a chill, we’re going to figure it out.
That’s how crypto has worked since the beginning. People have always figured things out, and I think it will be similar to this MiCA boom.
Q4: Crypto was supposed to be private from day one. Yet in 26 most platforms still ask who you are before letting you swap. Is truly private swapping even realistic or just a marketing promise?
Vasily Shilov: Let’s break down what privacy actually means. Level one is no registration and no KYC. Most of us are already familiar with this flow. It’s not a plan or a roadmap — it’s a basic model. You don’t create accounts, you don’t leave personal information, you just swap. That is the first level.
Level two is transaction privacy. That means the transaction or swap itself cannot be tracked on the blockchain. This is a different approach, especially in ecosystems like Monero, Dash, and others.
This is much harder. No-KYC privacy and non-transparent transactions are two different things, and they require different systems. The second level needs systems that are less dependent on centralized infrastructure.
Private swaps are realistic, but we need to separate the two concepts. No-KYC swaps are already available in many places. Full transaction anonymity is the next stage.
If you can achieve really private swaps or transaction functionality, congrats, you made it. If not, you should keep trying to do it.
Q5: AI agents are now making trades autonomously in D5. Is this the future of crypto trading or just hype, and how does swap space fit into a world where bots do the swapping?
Vasily Shilov: Let me approach it from two standpoints. Imagine an AI agent, or someone who created an AI agent, comes to me and says: give me your API so I can trade automatically with it. I say yes, and then suddenly it starts doing crazy things. Maybe it gets tricked into working with bad actors. Then both of us have problems.
With AI, there are still a lot of untapped areas and ethical questions. Who do you blame? You can’t really blame the AI. Do you blame the person who created it?
But coming back to the topic, bots are already using a lot of automated strategies today. I’m also exploring some of these things myself because I’m lazy and want AI to work for me and make intelligent moves.
Calling it artificial intelligence is still a stretch, though. Truly autonomous agents that make real decisions are still rare. Most of what we see today is closer to large language models. But the direction is real.
I recently read a memo from Outlier Ventures about the agentic web or post-web, where it won’t be human beings interacting with the internet and computers in the same way anymore. Instead, agents will take over that interaction layer.
Since the first personal computers, we haven’t really changed how we work with computers. We still use keyboards and mice. The real transition to a new era will be when we no longer need to touch keyboards or mice to interact with computers.
For us, this is more of an opportunity than a threat. New quantitative trading strategies can be introduced by bots, and those agents will need places to swap, perform transactions, and work with tokens.
BTC, Monero, and other cryptocurrencies could become fuel for those agents. Right now, maybe you buy tokens through ChatGPT, but in the future, a lot of internet actions may be connected to cryptocurrency.
For those transactions and trading strategies, bots and agents will need APIs that give them exactly what they need. Developers already connect APIs to certain skills and tools, and suddenly they have their first AI agent. In the future, they will plug APIs into crypto trading too.
For platforms like ours, that can mean additional volume, fees, and use cases.
Q6: Which crypto wallets is SwapSpace integrating with so users can swap directly without leaving the app?
Vasily Shilov: Recently, we integrated with SafePal. Right now, SafePal is one of the flagship wallets inside the SwapSpace platform.
We are also talking with other crypto wallets like Tangem, Cake Wallet, and CoolWallet.
The idea is simple: the user opens the wallet, sees the best rates from many providers, including StealthEX.io, and makes the swap. The user can compare where the better deal is, who is the fastest, and who is the best option.
Our API is ready for that and works in the way most platforms expect. Wallet integrations are one of the next steps for us, and we expect more of them in the upcoming year and quarter.
What I’m most curious about is the next new use case. For both SwapSpace and StealthEX, we still approach similar segments and similar models, with different features and improvements.
But I’m thinking about what new use case could generate a huge amount of volume. Maybe something like a new AI agent with the power of crypto wallets and exchanges. I don’t see that often yet, but it’s interesting to think about.
Q7: RW tokens are exploding right now. What RWA assets can users already swap and swap space, and what’s coming next?
Vasily Shilov: I recently spoke with SwapSpace leadership about this because it is a big topic. Right now, we already have more than 150 tokens in our RWA category, including assets like Tesla stocks. We support them, and as more assets become tokenized, we will keep adding them.
Since we are a non-custodial platform, the principle is simple: any tokenized real-world asset should be swappable on SwapSpace. It should be as easy as swapping Ethereum to USDT.
At conferences, it was clear that institutions are moving toward RWAs. During Paris Blockchain Week especially, I met many people talking about RWAs, but sometimes when I tried to dive deeper into the conversation, it became clear that for traditional bankers and people in suits, RWAs mean something a bit different than they do for me.
Some people have seen beautiful pitch decks and “new era” language, but I still think RWAs are closer to the NFT concept in some ways. They might blow up, or they might go down.
Liquidity will definitely grow at some point. Demand for tokenizing buildings, cars, bicycles, and other assets may grow too. But I think RWAs will mostly become additional financial instruments that allow crypto users to invest in assets like buildings or Tesla stocks.
For institutions, RWAs create a bridge in their minds: something from traditional finance can be tokenized and sold to crypto users. It’s about taking the best from both worlds.
Q8: Big institutions want full transparency. Regular users want full privacy. These two things pull in completely opposite direction. So which side is swap space actually on?
Vasily Shilov: We are always going to be on the user’s side. That’s a no-brainer for any user-oriented platform.
That means we are basically on the privacy side. I consider myself a privacy geek in some ways. I do have accounts on platforms like Bybit or Binance, but they are not my primary go-to platforms. I also consider myself a retail user in some cases.
It’s not just because privacy is trendy in 2026. This has been our model since 2019, and it is quite close to what StealthEX has been building since 2018.
The founders of both projects had this state of mind from the start. We have never held users’ funds and we are not going to do that. I think that is the real crypto approach.
For projects like StealthEX and SwapSpace, this means no required registration. We genuinely approach the first level of privacy: no KYC, no registration, and in some cases, even no wallet connect required.
At the same time, institutions will solve transparency through their own tools: compliance, lawyers, KYC at the door, and so on. That is their job. Our job is to give users the best rate without asking who they are in the first place.
It is up to the end user to decide whether that is enough or whether they want the second layer of privacy, where their transactions are private too.
Right now, we are stuck between two models. On one side, there are MiCA regulations and attempts to reduce privacy for crypto users. On the other side, there is a massive number of people who love DEX access, no-KYC flows, and privacy-focused platforms.
Only time will show which side wins. Back in the day, everyone debated whether DEXs or CEXs were better. I think we are now moving closer to decentralized exchanges, but that is only my opinion.
Live Questions
Q9: What do you see as the biggest unsolved challenges in cross-chain liquidity right now, especially as we head into 2026, and how does SwapSpace plan to tackle them differently from other aggregators?
Vasily Shilov: We are a non-custodial service, and we do not have our own liquidity. Instead, we work with many providers that have their own liquidity, and this helps us ensure a good user experience. We also add only assets that have liquidity behind them.
For example, if there is some random meme coin with only $5,000 in liquidity, we are not going to add it. But if there is a serious project with backers, a launched token, and listings on platforms like MEXC or Bybit, then that is something that can definitely be tradable on SwapSpace. I hope I addressed this point.
Q10: How does SwaviSpace decide which new providers or actions to onboard?
Vasily Shilov: This is mostly handled by me and the B2B team. The core thing we keep in mind when considering a new exchange or provider is whether it will really give something to the end user that they cannot already get.
That could mean better rates, a new privacy layer, or new functionality like private transactions. If a specific provider has a feature that we can implement and give to the end user, that is something we consider.
Usually, we look at whether the provider brings something useful to the SwapSpace product, whether it adds interesting features, and whether those features will see demand in the market.
We receive a lot of requests from platforms that want to become our partners. We look at them case by case, talk to the teams, and try to understand their approach. Maybe they can add something interesting, maybe they can’t. That is how we usually stay selective.
Vadim Taszycki, StealthEX: Thank you all for joining today!
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Don’t forget to do your own research before buying any crypto. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
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