• Where is my money?
• Why does the transaction take so long to process?
• I have not received funds for more than a day, what should I do?
• Yesterday I sent bitcoin/ether/usdt to my address, but it still hasn’t arrived, why?
• Three years ago I sent bitcoin with a commission of 2 cents, and now you want $20, are you out of your mind?

These are questions that regularly come from users to our support team, although … probably not only to ours 🙂

Let’s be a little clearer and use our service as an example to explain why this happens and what can be done.

Trustee Wallet is a non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet. This means that only the owner of the seed phrase has access to the wallet balances. Accordingly, all necessary commissions must be paid by the user personally.

When creating a transaction in cryptocurrency, it is necessary to proceed from the current network commission (the commission that miners receive for processing user transactions) in order to roughly represent the transaction processing time. Why about? The network commission is a variable value and directly depends on the number of unprocessed transactions in the network as a whole.

It is worth noting that non-custodial services, including Trustee, do not charge a commission for cryptocurrency transfers, there is only a network commission!

How it works?

Let’s say you decide to send some bitcoin to your friend. To do this, you need to create an order, specify the recipient’s address and the amount of sent bitcoin. Next, you need to specify the network commission, for example, Trustee offers a choice of three options for the commission that must be paid to the miners for processing the transaction. These values ​​are formed based on the analysis of the current recommended fees in the network. Also, the user is given complete freedom in choosing a commission if he does not agree with the proposed sizes (Set commission manually). After choosing a commission and confirming the transfer of funds, a transaction is formed and it is placed in the mempool.

Then everything depends on how quickly the miners take the transaction from the mempool, confirm it and include it in the block. The speed of transaction processing directly depends on the commission set. The generated transaction must contain its hash (a link that is a confirmation of sending funds). Using the hash, you can track the status of the transaction in the mempool (the queue and the number of network confirmations). If the transaction does not have confirmations, it means that the miners have not processed it yet and in fact the funds are in your address. It is important to understand that the queue in the mempool can change. Before the transaction you created, others may enter the queue with higher commissions.

The mechanism described above works both for normal transactions between user addresses and for exchanges/withdrawals to a card.

It is worth remembering that transactions in cryptocurrencies are irreversible, that is, sending cannot be canceled.

What to do if the transaction takes a long time?

If the transaction is “hung” and is in the mempool for a long time, and the transfer is needed urgently, Trustee Wallet took care of this by adding the RBF (Replace-By-Fee) transaction acceleration function. This feature allows you to increase the commission in an unprocessed transaction at the expense of the remaining free funds on the user’s balance. At the moment, the function is working in test mode, so it is not always possible to speed up the transaction. It depends on some factors of the blockchain itself.

In order to use the Replace-By-Fee function and speed up the transaction, follow the instructions:

1. Go to Settings and hold down “About Wallet” for 20 seconds, until the vibration response. The wallet will switch to the “Development” mode;
2. Go back to your transaction and click “Increase Fee”;
3. Enter a commission higher than it was before.