Buy $DOG with Bitcoin: a beginner's guide

Written by the volunteers who run DogSwap. Last updated 2026-09-15. Every number stated as a constant below is one the site enforces in code. Everything that moves is described as a mechanism and left to the live screen, because a figure printed here would be out of date before you read it.

Buying $DOG means trading some of your Bitcoin for a rune that then sits in your own wallet, on Bitcoin itself. No account is created, no balance is held for you, and nothing is wrapped or bridged. This page is the practical half: what has to be in your wallet before you start, what your order size actually costs you, and the two clocks that catch people out. For what $DOG is, read what is $DOG first.

Before you start: spendable sats, not just a balance

This is the one that stops more first swaps than anything else, and it is worth a minute.

A Bitcoin transaction is funded by whole coins, not by a balance. To buy $DOG your payment address needs genuinely spendable BTC beyond the trade itself, because the transaction has to pay a miner. Keep at least 10,000 sats there. That number is in the code, it is what the review screen teaches, and it is what the Max button quietly subtracts so that pressing Max never builds a transaction that cannot pay for itself.

A wallet showing a healthy balance can still fail here, which is why the number exists. When Taproot assets are in play the small coins get left alone, so what looks like a balance can be made of pieces the build will not touch. The failure reads "not enough UTXOs" and it confuses everyone the first time.

You will also need one of three wallets: UniSat, OKX or Xverse. That list is short because it is the list of wallets that have signed real swaps here in both directions, not the list of wallets that exist.

Where the $DOG actually lands

A Runes wallet has two jobs and sometimes two addresses. The payment address, starting bc1q, holds the BTC that pays fees. The ordinals address, starting bc1p, is where the $DOG arrives and lives. Xverse hands over both and we will not proceed unless both come back. UniSat and OKX serve both jobs from one address, so the review says from your wallet rather than naming which.

Either way, the review screen names the destination before you sign. Your $DOG is not held anywhere by us at any point, and there is nothing to withdraw later.

The smallest order that makes sense, and why there is a floor

The card refuses anything under about 10 US dollars worth, and refuses it before it even asks for a price. The reason is arithmetic rather than policy: at ordinary network fee rates a 10 dollar swap already pays roughly a dollar to a miner, so below that you are mostly buying a transaction rather than $DOG. The floor is there to protect you from a trade that is mostly fee. In $DOG or in sats the equivalent moves with the price, so the screen names the floor in whatever unit you are paying in, at the live rate.

What your size costs you

This is the part worth understanding before your first buy, because it is the one thing nobody warns beginners about.

$DOG on Bitcoin trades against a pool, and that pool is thin. The bigger your order relative to the pool, the worse the price you get, and it gets worse faster than your order gets bigger. A small buy costs a couple of percent against the going rate. A large one can cost you a large fraction of what you put in, and the venue will quote that without complaint.

So the card prices your exact size, and the band between the two amounts fills as your order presses into the pool:

• Above 3 percent against the going rate the band thickens and warms.
• Above 10 percent a tap is not accepted as consent. The primary button becomes a press and hold, about 1.6 seconds, long enough that it cannot happen by habit. There is no typing and no puzzle; it is one deliberate gesture.
• What you pay and what you receive each carry their dollar value on the card, so you can compare the two in the units you actually think in.

We do not publish a table of what each size costs, and that is deliberate. The number depends on how deep the pool is at the moment you ask, and the depth of this pool has roughly doubled and halved again over the weeks we have been measuring it. Any table we printed here would be a stale number wearing the clothes of a measurement. Ask for a quote at the size you have in mind and read what it gives you; that quote is real and it is yours.

The practical advice that follows from the shape: if the quote gives you less than you hoped, the fix is usually a smaller order, or the same order split over time, not a different venue.

The two clocks, and they are not the same clock

Beginners merge these two and then wonder why a swap failed while they were reading carefully. They are separate and they measure different things.

• 35 seconds is how long the price is good for. That is the venue's own validity window for a quote and it is the only clock in the product that concerns the price. When it runs out the card fetches a fresh price rather than let you sign against a dead one. Nothing is lost when it expires.
• 30 seconds is how long you have to sign once the transaction has been built, and it starts at the moment of the build. It includes reading the review and approving in your wallet. A countdown runs on the button and disarms it at zero, rather than spend your signature on a build the venue has already given up on.

So read the review, but know that the second clock is already running while you do. If it runs out, nothing is lost and nothing was signed. You ask again.

Slippage is a floor, not a price

The slippage control defaults to 5 percent, with 1 and 3 as the other presets. Two things about it are worth knowing.

First, it is whole percent, not basis points. Typing 50 here would mean fifty percent, not half of one. The site refuses anything above its ceiling rather than quietly clamping it, precisely so that a wrong 50 fails loudly instead of executing.

Second, and this is the part that is misread: your slippage setting is not what you pay. It is the worst outcome you are willing to accept before the build is refused. On a buy, the site checks that what arrives is at least your quoted amount reduced by that limit, and refuses to arm the button if the build comes in under that floor. On a real measured swap, the build landed well under 1 percent away from its quote against a limit of 5. Setting 5 does not mean giving away 5.

Changing the limit after you have consented revokes that consent, so the review asks again.

What it costs, honestly

There are two costs, and you see both before you sign.

The venue fee is set by whoever runs the pool, and it can change without anything being deployed on this site. So we never print it as a fixed number. The card reads it from your own quote and shows it as already inside what you receive, which means it tracks reality by construction rather than by us remembering to update a page.

The network fee is what the miner is paid, read live from the current Bitcoin mempool and shown on the card in sat/vB. It has nothing to do with us and we take none of it.

There is no itemised fee breakdown on this site, by design. The honest figure is the all-in one: what the quote says you receive, which already has the venue fee and the effect of your size on the pool inside it. The review then shows the miner fee in sats before you sign. An itemisation we could not source would be less true than the numbers we can prove.

Make sure you are buying the right $DOG

There is more than one thing called DOG, and one of the confusions is expensive.

What you buy here is the rune DOG.GO.TO.THE.MOON, Rune ID 840000:3, etched in the Bitcoin halving block and living in ordinary Bitcoin coins in your own wallet. There is also a bridged version on Solana with the same name. That one is a claim on a bridge rather than a rune on Bitcoin: same name, same five decimal places, different asset and different risk. Neither one converts to the other by holding it. We do not operate or route a bridge, and this site only ever touches the rune on Bitcoin.

The token list this site quotes against carries lookalikes with names close enough to fool a quick read, which is why the site keys the asset on its Rune ID rather than on a display name.

What can go wrong, and what happens when it does

• The build is refused. The site would rather refuse than show you a confident screen over bytes it did not understand. A refusal costs nothing and can be retried.
• The route touches a tiny pool. The venue picks a route per quote and sometimes proposes one that passes through a pool with almost nothing in it. We refuse to relay those. The same size will usually route straight through on the next quote, so a refusal here is not a verdict on your order size.
• Your coins cannot be checked. The site asks an indexer what each of your coins is carrying. If that answer does not come, the input is marked unverified and the button does not arm. It is never rounded up to safe.
• A clock runs out. Nothing is signed and nothing is lost. Ask again.

In every one of those cases the outcome is the same: no signature leaves your wallet. That is the whole design. A refusal you can retry is recoverable, and a Bitcoin transaction is not.

The order it happens in

1. Connect one of the three wallets. No account, no email, no sign-up.
2. Enter what you want to spend, in BTC or in dollars. Keep the fee buffer in mind.
3. Read what the card says you receive. This is the number that matters.
4. Open the review. It shows every coin that is spent and every destination that is paid.
5. Sign the transaction in your own wallet. This site never sees a key and cannot sign anything.
6. Wait about 10 minutes for a block. You can close the page; the swap completes without you.

The full path from quote to block, including what the review is proving, is in how a Runes swap settles and what is a PSBT. When you are ready, start a swap.

Questions