Is your digital asset & cryptocurrency transaction pending? This guide will help you to understand why it takes time to process your transactions.
For security reasons, we require a digital asset deposit to receive a number of confirmations on its blockchain before the funds can be credited to your account.
What are confirmations?
When a transaction is broadcasted to the network, it has to wait to be included in a block by the miners. Once a transaction has been included in a block, the transaction has received 1 confirmation. With each subsequent block, the number of confirmations increases for the transaction. To avoid the risks of double spending, funds aren’t credited until a number of confirmations have taken place depending on the cryptocurrency. Each block is found at a different rate depending on the blockchain.
| Assets | Confirmations Required | Typical Pending Time |
| Bitcoin - BTC | 6 | ~ 60 minutes |
| Ethereum - ETH | 15 | ~ 10 minutes |
| Ripple - XRP | N/A | Near-instant |
| Litecoin - LTC | 6 | ~ 15 minutes |
| Bitcoin Cash - BCH | 6 | ~ 60 minutes |
For example, a block is found on average every 10 minutes on the Bitcoin blockchain, and GreenX only credits BTC deposits to a client’s account after 6 confirmations, which takes approximately one hour.
Occasionally, transactions are not accepted by the network and remain marked as 'PENDING' for 2-3 days. Typically these transactions will never confirm. These problem transactions are typically caused by three main reasons:
- Receiving a transaction with insufficient fees
All transactions require a miner fee to be confirmed by the asset network. If the sender did not use a sufficient fee, your deposit may never confirm. - Spending unconfirmed assets
If you are trying to send assets that appear as pending in your account your transaction will also remain in a pending state until your deposits are confirmed. You can think of this as a waterfall effect. Until the funds you receive are properly confirmed all of your sent funds will be marked with this same pending state. - The network is experiencing a high volume
Sometimes there is a high volume of digital currency being sent globally, and there are more transactions than there is space available in each new block to include the transaction.
If you are experiencing any issues when depositing to GreenX, please do reach out to our support team members by sending an email to: support@greenx.io