Money / Pair 15 of 41

A deposit that is slow, or a deposit that is gone

You paid. The balance on the account has not changed. From that screen the two situations are the same page with the same number on it, and the difference lives somewhere the site cannot show you.

Two things that both look like waiting

The account shows the figure it showed before you sent anything. No error, no red text, nothing to click. That page looks identical whether your coin is sitting in a queue behind a fee too small for the hour, or whether it landed at an address nobody at the market is watching.

The surface is the same one-way glass in both situations. The site only reports what has reached its own ledger, and it has nothing to say about a transaction it has never seen. Absence on the account page is not evidence about the chain. It is evidence that no credit has been matched, which is a much smaller statement than it looks.

Both are real transactions. In both, the money left. That is what makes the balance useless as an arbiter here. A payment that is short by a fraction produces the same blank result as well, which is a third thing worth ruling out while you are looking.

The record that answers it

A transaction that exists on the chain is visible to anybody who looks it up. That is the point of the thing. So you have two separate questions with two separate answers: did it leave, and did it arrive at an address the market associates with you. The account page speaks only to a third question, whether the credit has been matched, and it answers that one with silence.

If the id does not resolve at all, nothing was ever broadcast, and that is a wallet matter rather than a market one. Look at the outgoing list in the wallet itself before you assume anything about the operator.

Which way the mistake is expensive

If you treat a slow deposit as a lost one

You send a second payment. Two transactions are now heading for the same place, you have paid the network twice, and the first one still lands. Turning an accidental double deposit back into a single one depends entirely on whoever reads messages.

If you treat a lost deposit as a slow one

You wait, and waiting is the one move that does nothing here. The coin sits at an address the market has no key for, and the delay costs you the hours in which you might have worked out how the wrong string got in front of you.

Neither is comfortable, but only one of them spends money rather than time. A queued payment resolves itself with no help from you. A second payment sent in a hurry does not come back on its own. If you can only be certain of one thing before acting, be certain that you have not already paid.

The next move in each case

If it is slow

Do nothing for a while, and specifically do not send again. Watch the confirmation count on the record you already pulled up. If your wallet can raise the fee on a pending transaction, that is the only useful lever you hold.

If it is lost

Work backwards to where the address came from. If it arrived from anywhere other than the deposit page inside your own account, that route is the thing to fix. The pair on addresses that expired covers the two ways that goes wrong.

Questions readers send about this pair

How long can a deposit sit before it counts as lost?

There is no hour at which slow turns into lost. Time is not what separates them. A transaction carrying a fee below what the network is asking can wait a very long while and still confirm, and one pointed at the wrong destination was already lost in its first second. The destination decides it, not the clock.

The transaction has confirmations but my balance is still zero. Which is it?

Confirmations mean the chain has accepted the payment. Crediting is a separate step on the market ledger and it can lag well behind. If the destination matches the address your account issued, you are still in the slow case, only further along it.

Can a market recover coin sent to the wrong address?

Not if the address is not theirs. Nobody moves coin without the key for the destination. An address they issued but tied to another session is a different situation and worth raising, since that one sits on their side of the fence.