Why is my BTC withdrawal taking long to confirm in the network?Updated 2 years ago

Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency and its network sometimes gets congested. When there is congestion, transactions compete with each other for a slot in a block. Transactions with higher fees have priority. Once a transaction gets included in a block, it becomes confirmed in the network.

Normally we pay enough fees for transactions to be included in the next few blocks, but this doesn't work when there is a sudden spike in congestion. The reason for this is simple: if we send a transaction with a given fee that is enough for the current network congestion and soon after the congestion gets worse, the fee included will not be enough for the new conditions. When this happens, the transaction will remain pending (unconfirmed) until the congestion goes back to the level as it was when the transaction was sent.

There are two solutions for this:

1. Simply wait until the congestion goes down. Since it is not possible to know when this will happen, we cannot estimate when your transaction will be confirmed.
2. We can replace your transaction with another one with higher fees. This will likely cause your transaction to be confirmed much faster, but there is one potential problem: since we are replacing the transaction with another one, the hash (also called tx ID) will change. This may or may not be OK depending on the destination. If the destination of this payment is your personal wallet in which you control the private key (e.g. you have 12/24 recovery words) then everything is OK. However, if the destination is another service, please ask them if it's OK to use RBF ("Replace by fee", the formal name of this technique).

If you would like to proceed with option 2 then contact support via chat or email and request it