Usually feels like
Minutes
You stay at the keyboard and it finishes there.
A watcher running on a timer is quick by design, but it runs when it runs, and nothing at your end brings the next run forward.
The wait, in plain words
Somewhere outside the market you can see that the payment settled. On the deposit page the figure is still the one from before. Nothing is broken and nothing is being withheld from you. The two things being compared are written by two different processes that were never introduced.
This wait begins where the previous one ends. There the network had not agreed yet. Here it has, and the market simply has not looked since it did.
It is short in principle and it is the wait people find hardest to sit through, because there is visible proof on one side of the glass and a stale figure on the other.
Underneath, while nothing moves
A chain is a shared public record. Anyone can read it and everybody reads the same thing. A market balance is a private database row. It is written by the market, read by the market, and shown to you when you ask for a page.
Between the two sits a watcher. It is a process that talks to a node, asks what has settled since it last asked, works out which of those settlements belong to addresses it cares about, and writes the matching credits into the database. It wakes on a timer of its own. Between wakings it is doing nothing at all, and there is no door to knock on.
Credits also queue. A watcher that finds many settlements in one pass writes them in some order, and yours is somewhere in that order. Many markets additionally hold a credit until the settlement is deep enough to be safe against the chain reorganising underneath them, which means the balance moves in stages rather than in a single step.
That is why a balance can appear and then change. A provisional credit is written, then adjusted once the market is more certain, or a network fee is accounted for, or an amount is converted at a rate taken when the credit was written rather than when you pressed send. Movement after the first appearance is ordinary and is not a sign that anything has gone wrong.
| What you are looking at | Who writes it | What makes it move |
|---|---|---|
| The chain | Whoever assembles blocks, on a schedule nobody controls | A block that contains your payment |
| The watcher | The market, on a timer of its own | The timer coming round again |
| Your balance line | The market database | The watcher writing a credit into the row |
| The page in front of you | Your browser | A reload, which re-reads the same row it read before |
Behaving, and not behaving
A credit that is late and a credit that is never coming look identical for the first stretch, and then they stop looking identical.
A credit on its way
The payment settled to an address the market issued for this deposit, and the deposit page still shows that same address as the one it is expecting.
The amount and the asset match what the page asked for, and the settlement is deep enough that a careful market would be content to act on it.
A credit that is not coming
The payment went to an address from an earlier visit, or to one the market rotated away from before you pressed send.
The asset is not the one the deposit page was asking for, or the amount fell under a floor the market quietly ignores.
Reloading changes none of this. The page reads a row. The row is written by a process on the far side that cannot see your browser and would not care if it could. A reload every few moments produces exactly the same row, and at a market with a front layer counting arrivals it can also earn you a gate screen stacked on top of the wait you already have.
If the payment went somewhere the market was never watching, this stops being a wait and becomes a question about recovery. The answer to that question is usually poor, and it is poor immediately rather than later. Nothing about a deposit address improves by being left alone for a while, so it is worth checking the string properly once instead of hoping through several reloads.
Safe to do meanwhile
The work here is verification, done once, carefully, and then put down.
- Compare the destination against the address the page gave youCharacter by character, at the beginning and the end of the string at minimum.
- Keep the transaction identifier where you can find itA credit that has to be argued about without one is an argument with no evidence in it.
- Close the deposit tab and come back laterA poll on the far side runs whether or not anybody is watching for it.
- Read how longer settlement is handledIf the market wants depth before crediting, the honest band is longer than this one.
What makes it longer
This delay grows for reasons that sit almost entirely on the market side, plus one that sits entirely on yours.
- A watcher polling on a long cycle, which is more likely outside the hours when the market is busy.
- A backlog of credits to write after a stretch when the market was unreachable.
- Maintenance, which usually stops the watcher before it stops the shop. That has a card of its own.
- A market that waits for depth before showing anything, so the network finishing is not the end of the story.
- Continuous reloading, which does nothing to the poll and can move you behind a gate.
What this card is not. This card is not a claim about how any particular market credits deposits, and nothing here is looking at a balance on your behalf.
Questions people ask about this wait
Why did the balance appear and then change?
A first credit is often provisional. It can be adjusted for a network fee, for a conversion taken at the moment of crediting, or when the market becomes more certain about the settlement it is crediting against.
Does reloading the page make the credit arrive sooner?
No. The page reads a database row. That row is written by a separate process on its own timer, and the process has no way of knowing your browser exists.