The chain finished and the market had not looked yet

The transfer shows the confirmations everybody said were needed. The balance on the market has not moved. The reader concludes the coin is slow, or that the transfer went to the wrong place.

Neither. The chain did its part. A piece of the market software has to notice, and noticing is a scheduled activity, not an instant one.

Two clocks, not one

The first clock is the chain. A transaction is broadcast, included in a block, and then buried under further blocks. That process is public and can be watched by anybody, and it finishes when it finishes.

The second clock belongs to the market. Something on their side polls for incoming payments, decides whether the confirmation count satisfies their policy, and updates an account balance. That poll runs at whatever interval the operator chose. It can be seconds. It can be a long time. It can be stopped for maintenance without anybody being told.

The reader watches the first clock, which is visible, and forms expectations about the second, which is not.

Why the coin gets blamed

Because the chain is the part with a public display. There is a page showing confirmations ticking up, so it feels like the authoritative view of the transaction. It is authoritative about the transfer and says nothing about the credit.

There is a subtler reason too. People have been told that a certain number of confirmations means done. That number is a market policy, not a property of the coin, and different operators pick different ones. Meeting the number you read somewhere else does not oblige anybody to credit anything.

What is actually worth doing

• Confirm the transaction exists and reached the address you were given. That is your evidence and it is independent of the market.
• Note the exact amount and the time. Support conversations go faster when the first message contains both.
• Wait past the point where waiting feels reasonable, because the polling interval is not published.
• Do not send it again. That failure is described under acting twice and it is expensive.

What follows from getting it right

The panic stops, which is the main thing, because the panic is what causes the second transfer. You also ask a better question when you finally do ask. A message saying the transfer is confirmed on chain and the balance has not moved is a message support can act on. A message saying the coin is broken is not.

One honest note. A credit that never arrives at all, past any plausible batch interval, stops being this case and starts being the market going quiet. This page is about a delay. It is not a promise about an outcome.

The part that is genuinely yours

Two things in this sequence belong to the reader and it is worth being clear about them, because this page is otherwise an argument for patience.

The first is the address you sent to. If it was copied from the deposit screen at the moment of sending, fine. If it was saved from an earlier session and reused, that is a different failure with the same symptom, and reused deposit addresses have caught out a lot of people.

The second is the amount. A transfer that arrives short of the amount the system expected can sit uncredited indefinitely while everything on the chain looks perfect. This one is quiet, it is common, and no display anywhere will point it out to you.

• Back to the cases the market caused
• When the chain itself was simply slow
• What you can actually observe