Usually feels like
Minutes
You stay at the keyboard and it finishes there.
Batches and queues run on a cycle rather than on demand, and the market half of the wait usually ends at the keyboard when nobody has to look at it by hand.
The wait, in plain words
You asked for the balance to go out. The page says requested, or pending, or processing. Out on the network there is nothing at all to find, because nothing has been signed yet.
The common mistake is treating this as one wait with two halves. They are stacked, not blended. The first is a market deciding to pay you. The second is a network settling a payment that already exists. They fail differently, they are fixed differently, and only one of them has anybody in it to talk to.
Which one you are in decides everything about what to do next, and there is a simple test for it further down this card.
Underneath, while nothing moves
Markets of this shape do not sign a transaction for every request. Signing costs fees, and paying many people separately costs a great deal more than paying them together. So requests are gathered and paid in batches on a cycle, and a request that arrives just after a batch has run waits for the next one to come round.
There is usually a queue in front of the batch as well. Requests are held, checked against the balance, checked against how the account has been behaving, and sometimes held for a person to look at. Manual review is common for a first withdrawal, for an amount that is large relative to the account it is leaving, and for anything requested soon after a passphrase change or a change of destination. Review runs on human time and human availability, neither of which is on a cycle.
The wallet the market pays from can also run dry. A market that keeps most of its funds away from the machine serving pages has to move some back before it can pay a batch at all, and that move is another human step behind another set of keys. None of this appears on the withdrawal page, which usually shows a single word.
Once the batch is signed and broadcast you are no longer waiting on the market. You are waiting on the same holding area and the same fee pressure described in a first confirmation on a deposit, with the difference that this time the fee was chosen by the market and not by you.
Behaving, and not behaving
Before deciding anything, establish which of the two waits you are actually in. The test is whether a transaction identifier exists yet.
A withdrawal in the queue
The page shows it as requested or pending, and the amount has already left the balance you can spend.
Nothing is on the network yet, which is exactly what a queued request looks like, and there is nothing further to be learned by looking again.
A withdrawal that has stopped
The amount is back in the balance, or the request has gone from the list altogether, which usually means it was refused rather than delayed.
Or it sits in review while the account carries a notice about a recent change, in which case what you are waiting for is a person and not a batch.
- No identifier yet
- You are in the market wait. Nothing exists on the network, and nothing outside the market can tell you anything about it.
- An identifier exists
- The market has done its part. From here it is a network wait, and the market cannot hurry it any more than you can.
- An identifier that finds nothing
- The payment was signed but has not spread yet, or the market recorded it on its own side slightly ahead of the broadcast.
Knowing which side of that line you are on is the entire point of the exercise. In the market wait a message to support is at least addressed to somebody who could act on it, though it will be answered in a much slower band than the withdrawal itself. In the network wait there is nobody to ask and nothing to ask for.
The one case that is neither is a destination typed wrong. That is not a delay and it does not become one by being waited on. It is the same problem as coins sent to the wrong place, arriving from the other direction.
Safe to do meanwhile
The waiting itself is dead time, but there is a short list worth settling before it ends rather than after.
- Find out whether an identifier existsIt is the one fact that separates the two waits from each other.
- Check the destination against your own record of itA destination typed wrong is not slow, and no amount of waiting improves it.
- Do not request a second withdrawalA second request can queue alongside the first rather than replacing it.
- Read the deposit side of the same mechanismThe network half of this wait is that card seen from the other direction.
What makes it longer
The market half stretches for reasons you will never be shown, and the network half stretches for reasons nobody controls.
- A request that arrives just after a batch has gone out.
- A first withdrawal from an account, which is the case most likely to be held for somebody to look at.
- A recent passphrase change or a new destination, which many markets treat as a reason to slow down rather than speed up.
- Maintenance, which tends to stop payouts before it stops the shop. See maintenance finishing.
- Requesting again, which adds a second entry to the same queue and can trigger the review you were hoping to avoid.
- A crowded network at the moment of broadcast, which extends the half of the wait the market has already finished with.
What this card is not. This card does not say how any particular market batches payouts or when it decides to look at one by hand.