You click a button. A while later, coins turn up in your wallet. Here's what happens in between.
Most people never think about it until a withdrawal takes longer than expected. After that, it's all they think about. So let's lift the lid.
It starts with us
When you request a withdrawal, our system picks it up straight away. Nearly every time, it's processed automatically and sent to the blockchain without anyone touching it.
Some get a second look from a member of staff, which can take up to 24 hours. That usually happens because it's your first withdrawal, because anti-money-laundering rules require a check, or because something about the activity looks unusual. It isn't an accusation. Often it's the system spotting a pattern that could mean someone else is in your account, and if that's the case, a short delay is exactly what you'd want.
The fee
Every blockchain charges a fee to process a transaction. That fee goes to the network, not to us. It comes out of your balance, and we add nothing on top: no handling charge, nothing hidden.
Tokens like USDT, USDC, SHIB and PEPE live on someone else's blockchain, and that chain wants paying in its own coin. So we pay the gas in the network's coin and deduct the equivalent in the token you're withdrawing. You get one number in one coin, and you don't have to do any conversions.
The waiting room
Your transaction is then broadcast to the network and lands in the mempool, a queue of transactions waiting to be written into a block. When the network is busy, transactions paying higher fees get picked first. That's why the same withdrawal can take ten minutes on a quiet Tuesday and an hour in a market frenzy. Nothing's broken. The network's just busier.
Confirmations
Once your transaction is in a block, it has one confirmation, and every block added after that counts as another. Wallets and exchanges often wait for several confirmations before showing the coins as yours, and coins produce blocks at very different speeds:
- Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: roughly every ten minutes
- Litecoin: about every two and a half minutes
- Dogecoin: about once a minute
- Ethereum and Ethereum Classic: every 12 seconds or so
- Polygon: every couple of seconds
- XRP: every few seconds
- BNB Smart Chain and Solana: under half a second
That's why your LTC can beat your BTC home even when the BTC left first. And if your coins show on a block explorer but not in your exchange balance, the exchange is still waiting on its own confirmation count.
The network trap
This is the part that actually costs people money.
USDT and USDC can go out on BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum or Polygon. SHIB goes out on BNB Smart Chain or Ethereum. PEPE is Ethereum only.
The catch is that addresses on all three look identical: they all start with 0x and they're all the same length. Nothing stops you pasting an Ethereum address and picking Polygon. The transaction goes through fine, it just lands on a network the other end isn't watching. If it's your own wallet, switching networks usually reveals the coins. If it's an exchange, you're at the mercy of its support team.
So match the network to what the receiving side asks for. BEP-20 means BNB Smart Chain, and ERC-20 means Ethereum. If you're not sure, don't guess.
It's worth watching the cost as well. Ethereum gas can run to a few dollars, while BNB Smart Chain and Polygon usually cost pennies. On small withdrawals, that adds up.
XRP and the missing tag
Exchanges often use one XRP address for every customer and tell deposits apart with a destination tag. When withdrawing to an exchange, put its tag in the tag box on our withdrawal form. Leave it off and your XRP arrives with no clue whose it is.
It works the same way in reverse. We use tags for deposits too, so when you send XRP to us, include the tag shown on your deposit page. With XRP, the tag goes with every transaction, in either direction.
Checking on it yourself
Every withdrawal gets a transaction ID, or TXID, which you'll find under Your Account > Withdraw > History. Paste it into a block explorer for the right chain and you can see exactly where the withdrawal is. It's the same information we'd look up if you asked us.
No undo button
Blockchain transactions can't be reversed. There's no chargeback, and once a withdrawal has been sent, we can't pull it back either. That's the trade-off for money nobody can freeze or claw back.
It also means the ten seconds you spend checking the address, the network and the tag are the most important ten seconds of the whole process. None of it's complicated. It just rewards the players who slow down at the right moment.