Nothing is opaque twice in a row

Bitcoin to Tether on Tron has eighteen paths through the published pairs at four hops or fewer. Fifteen of them pass through Monero somewhere, which is the thing that breaks the chain. Counting how many of them reach the destination without writing a transaction anybody can read along the way:

Not a thin result at three and four hops. Zero. The same count comes back for every pair tried — Tether to Bitcoin, Ethereum to Tether, Solana to Bitcoin — and in each case the single clean path is the two-hop crossing through Monero.

No provider this site talks to will swap Monero for Monero. Across the whole registry XMR is paired only with Bitcoin, Tether, Litecoin, Ethereum and Zcash, which means a route cannot stay opaque for two legs running. The coin in the middle of a longer route is always one whose ledger is public.

That turns a third hop into something other than more privacy. A Monero crossing removes the transaction that joined the two ends. A third leg through a transparent coin writes a new one — the payment into that coin, and the payment out of it, both visible, both joining the halves that had just been separated. The extra hop does not extend the gap. It bridges it.

It is the obvious objection and I had to go and check it. Zcash is a privacy coin, and xmr-to-zec and zec-to-xmr are both published here, so a route could in principle hop between two shielded coins and never touch a public ledger at all.

It cannot, because an exchange pays out to a transparent Zcash address. Shielding is something the recipient does afterwards, with their own wallet, on their own initiative — and it is not something this site performs, and not something it could verify if somebody claimed to have done it. A Zcash leg between two hops is a public record exactly like a Litecoin one.

So the set of coins treated as opaque in the code has one member in it. That is not an oversight, and the comment beside it says why: counting Zcash as opaque would be the most flattering mistake available here, which is reason enough to write the reasoning down rather than the conclusion.

The planner prices the longer paths rather than hiding them, which is the only way the argument is checkable. Asked for a route from 0.05 BTC into Tether, with four hops allowed, it considered fifteen shapes, priced three, and returned:

Twice the cost and a public record for it. That is the shape of the whole finding in one table: the longer routes are not a stronger version of the short one, they are the short one with something added back that it had just removed.

A fair question about a site that reads eight providers at once is whether the gaps between them ever add up to a free lunch. Sending 0.05 BTC into Monero at the best-paying provider and straight back out at the best-paying provider returns 0.04942599 BTC — a round trip of about minus one and a sixth of a percent, which is the provider margin showing up twice.

It closes for the same reason the long routes do: every leg costs a margin, and the margin is larger than the discrepancy between providers, because eliminating that discrepancy on their own books is what the providers are for. More legs is more cost on both questions. The answer did not depend on which one was being asked.

It stayed, and not out of sentiment. The two-hop path is the right route and it is not always a runnable one: Monero coverage moves, and quickly. The same pair has gone from three of eight providers quoting to seven of eight inside six minutes, and one route's first hop answered with two providers this afternoon where another had seven.

When the short path cannot be priced, a longer one often still can. So the planner looks for the fewest public records first and the fewest hops second, and offers a third hop only when the second one is unavailable — as a way of getting the transfer done rather than as a way of getting it done better. That is a different claim from the one the feature was going to make, and it is the one that survives being measured.

Paths were enumerated over this site's own pair registry, as simple paths: no coin visited twice, since a route returning to a coin it has already been through pays another spread to arrive where it already was. Figures were read from the live comparison on 11 October 2026, at the sizes stated, and quotes move. The round trip and the three-hop prices were taken within a few minutes of each other so the comparison holds; the premiums on the route pages themselves ranged from 0.63% to 1.59% across the day on unchanged pairs, which is the honest width of a figure like this.

The related piece on what a second hop does, and what it leaves exposed, is on the Monero page; the five routes and their live pricing are linked from it.