Manual swaps
5. Swap across Cardano DEXes to quote, review, and submit a swap.
The Swap page makes a one-off trade from your browser wallet or any of your strategy wallets, on one DEX or split across several. You get a live quote with price impact and a full fee breakdown, then sign once (or once per leg for a split).
Single-DEX swap
Choose the wallet to trade from: your connected browser wallet or any active strategy wallet.
Choose the token pair. One side must be ADA.
Enter the amount. Max fills in the largest buy your wallet can afford after fees and deposits (for a sell, your full token balance).
Pick a DEX or leave the aggregator to choose.
Set slippage tolerance (default 0.5%). This becomes the on-chain minimum-received.
Review the quote: expected output (walked through the pool curve, so price impact is included), price impact, and the fee breakdown — batcher, network, pool % and Surge fee.
Click Swap. Your browser wallet prompts to sign; a strategy wallet signs after the transaction guard checks the transaction.
The order appears in Recent activity as Submitted → Open → Filled. See Order statuses.
Quotes refresh as you type (with a short delay) and are considered fresh for 15 seconds. A built transaction is valid for 5 minutes; after that submitting fails with "Invalid or expired trade identifier" and you click Swap again to rebuild.
Buys are capped at 1,000,000,000 ADA. Sells need the token's decimals; if Surge cannot find them in the token registry it asks you to enter them.
Split (aggregated) swap
Turn on aggregator mode. Surge quotes the best single DEX and an optimal split of your amount across eligible DEX's pools. It recommends the split only when its saving beats the additional legs' flat fees.
Buys only (ADA in) in the current build, and only from a strategy wallet.
Splash is never included in a split, because its minimum-received cannot be enforced per leg; if Splash is the only venue, the split is refused with an explanation.
Legs smaller than 5 ADA are pruned.
Each leg shows its share, expected output, minimum output, price impact and fees; the order-level impact is the size-weighted average. The default slippage for split quotes is 1%, maximum 50%.
You can exclude DEX's from the aggregator in the swap preferences.
Execution. Surge builds the legs in a chain — each leg spends the change of the previous one — so all can be signed before any is on chain. Your strategy wallet must hold the total amount plus fees plus 5 ADA per leg plus a 2 ADA buffer in a single coin; a wallet fragmented into many small coins is refused with "consolidate your funds into a single UTxO first" (send the wallet's whole balance to itself to consolidate). Then each leg is signed and submitted in turn with a progress indicator.
If a later leg fails to submit after earlier ones succeeded, the earlier ones stand and the later ones must be re-quoted; Surge does not roll back.
Fees
The Surge fee is 0.2% of the ADA side per order (per leg in a split), reduced by your tier; see Fee breakdown for the worked example. The fee preview uses your account's rate, which the page fetches for the chosen DEX and pair.
Safety
Every swap from a strategy wallet passes the transaction guard: the ADA spend is capped at the amount you typed plus an allowance for fees, and for a sell only the token you are selling may leave the wallet. See Signing and approvals.
If the order does not fill
Manual swaps carry no minimum on Surge's records, so a stuck one is diagnosed as "unknown" rather than "won't fill". On Minswap it refunds by itself; elsewhere use Cancel & reclaim on the order row. See Cancelling stuck orders.
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