Two Hops or One: What Routing Through BTC Costs

On 5 November 2026, between 10:03 and 10:05 UTC, we asked the same question four ways: what do 100, 500, 1,000 and 5,000 USDT actually buy in monero? One route was direct. The other three converted the dollars into bitcoin, litecoin or zcash first, and then converted that coin into monero. Spot at the time was 636.03 dollars per XMR, 80,397 per BTC, 56.20 per LTC and 1,326.94 per ZEC, and the catalogue did not change during the measurement. The results split cleanly: at the smallest ticket the detour won, at every larger ticket it lost, and one of the three intermediate coins lost badly at every size. That split is not noise - it falls straight out of how a quote is built. (XMR to USDT exit)

Start with the result that contradicts the slogan. At 100 USDT the direct quote returned 0.13772791 XMR, which is 725.72 dollars per monero against a 636.03 spot - a 14.1% premium. Going through bitcoin returned 0.14274497 XMR, or 700.22 per monero: 3.6% more monero for the same hundred dollars, about 3.19 dollars. Through litecoin it was 0.14340530, 4.1% better. The direct corridor at that size was not competing. It was quoting one route with a lock attached, and that tier charges a flat 11.35 USDT: solve 0.13772791 = (100 - F) x 0.0015536467 and F comes out at 11.35. Eleven percent of a hundred-dollar order is not a spread. It is a floor price. (XMR to USDT exit)

That floor has an edge, and the edge is sharp. At 120 USDT the direct quote was still single-route and still locked: 0.1685068 XMR, or 712.13 per monero. At 130 USDT the second pool joined, the lock disappeared, and the payout jumped to 0.201283 - 645.55 per monero - with the interface reporting a 941 basis point advantage over the runner-up. Ten extra dollars bought 0.0327762 more monero, a marginal price of 305 dollars per XMR, less than half of spot. Everything above 130 sits on the flat part of the curve; everything below it sits on the cliff. On the direct corridor, the most expensive dollars you can spend are the ones just under the threshold. (XMR to USDT exit)

Above the cliff the ordering reverses and stays reversed. At 500 USDT direct paid 0.776294 XMR, via bitcoin 0.766679, via litecoin 0.768151 - losses of 6.12 and 5.18 dollars. At 1,000: 1.553118 direct against 1.534966 and 1.53683, losses of 11.55 and 10.36 dollars. At 5,000: 7.767704 against 7.681263 and 7.68626, losses of 54.98 and 51.80 dollars. In percentage terms it is the same 1.05% to 1.24% at every size, which is what a structural cost looks like: it does not care how much you send, it scales with it. The detour is not a fee you can outgrow or negotiate; it is a second band, and bands are multiplicative. (XMR to USDT exit)

A quote is a line, not a percentage, and two numbers describe it: a slope and a flat charge. Fitting the 500 and 5,000 points gives the direct corridor a slope of 0.0015536467 XMR per USDT - 643.34 dollars per monero - and a flat charge of 0.34 USDT. The bitcoin hop multiplies two slopes: 0.00001231354 BTC per USDT, which is 81,172.68 dollars per BTC, times 124.787366 XMR per BTC, which is 650.49 dollars per monero. That is 1.11% wider, with flat charges of 0.672 USDT on the first leg and 0.37 dollars on the second. The litecoin hop lands at 650.16 and 0.34 USDT, essentially the same. The zcash hop lands at 655.52 but carries a 19.00 dollar flat charge on the ZEC-XMR leg, which is why it lost 11.1% at 100 USDT and still 2.2% at 5,000. Same mechanism, different constant. (XMR to USDT exit)

Minimums are set per leg, so a chain of two orders inherits the tighter one. The first legs accept 14.08 USDT into bitcoin and 13.87 into litecoin; the second legs demand 0.00018593 BTC (14.95 dollars), 0.25768927 LTC (14.48) or 0.02142325 ZEC (28.43). A zcash hop therefore cannot start below about 28 dollars of notional no matter what you send into the first order. Ceilings behave the same way. The direct corridor caps at 175,602 USDT and USDT into bitcoin at 534,419, but bitcoin into XMR caps at 2.18508169 BTC - about 175,600 dollars - and litecoin into XMR at 1,358.69 LTC, about 76,300 dollars. The whole route's ceiling is the second leg's ceiling, and on LTC-XMR that is less than half of what the first leg would have taken. (XMR to USDT exit)

Cost also shows up on-chain, where a hop doubles the transaction count: two transactions become four, and the middle two are yours to send and to pay for. Moving the intermediate coin costs 141 vB on bitcoin, which at the 1 to 4 sat/vB the mempool was quoting - 56,901 transactions, 17.69 MvB at the time - is 141 to 564 satoshis, 0.11 to 0.45 dollars. On litecoin the same transfer is about 141 litoshis, a rounding error; on zcash a transparent transfer is the standard 10,000 zats, 0.13 dollars. Time is the larger cost. Fifteen bitcoin blocks ending this morning spanned 94.6 minutes, a median interval of 4.95 minutes, so a three-confirmation payout is a quarter of an hour before the second order even begins. Litecoin's fifteen blocks spanned 31.7 minutes, median 78.5 seconds; forty zcash blocks spanned 52.7 minutes, median 49 seconds. And the second leg cannot be locked in advance: over the fourteen minutes we sampled, the quote on a 0.01230526 BTC ticket ranged from 1.533577 to 1.537139 XMR - a 0.23% band, about a fifth of the hop's entire cost. (Monero confirmation waits)

The privacy argument deserves a straight answer, because it is usually why people ask about hops at all. A hop changes what each venue sees, and that is the whole of what it changes. The first venue sees your USDT deposit and pays bitcoin to an address you name. The second sees a bitcoin deposit from that address and pays monero to your wallet. Each holds one half of the same movement, and the address in the middle is the hinge. Reuse that address once and the two orders cluster; use a fresh one per hop and you have paid 1.1% plus a fee to remove a link that the amount itself may restore, because 0.01230526 BTC is not a round number - it is exactly what the first order paid out. If the goal is to break association, the hops that matter are inside a privacy coin, not between venues. (XMR to USDT exit)

Five rules follow. Quote the hop before assuming it is expensive: below about 130 USDT it is the cheaper side of the cliff, and the saving at 100 was 3.19 dollars against a 0.11 dollar network fee. Above 130, stop hopping unless the direct corridor does not exist - at 5,000 the detour cost 54.98 dollars for nothing. Never hop through a coin whose second leg carries a wide flat charge: zcash's 19 dollars shows up immediately if you fit two sizes. Count clocks as well as prices, because a bitcoin hop adds roughly fifteen minutes before the second order can be placed, and each order has its own 30-minute funding window. Keep two refund addresses, one per order, because a first leg refunded to the second order's address is how a cheap route turns into an expensive incident. Every figure here is a snapshot from 10:03 to 10:05 UTC on 5 November 2026; the live quote governs. (recovering misdirected funds)