What a deposit that works actually looks like
Troubleshooting is guesswork until you know the shape of the thing when it goes right. A top-up here has five steps, and only one of them is yours.
- You open a deposit for an amount in dollars. Minimum $100 the first time, $100 after that, up to $100,000 in one go.
- The screen answers with four things: an address, an exact amount of crypto, the name of the network in plain words, and — on the chains that need one — a memo or tag. Sometimes a countdown sits alongside them.
- You send exactly that, on exactly that network.
- The chain confirms it once. Crediting waits for a single network confirmation, which is minutes on most chains.
- The balance moves by itself. There is nothing to click, nothing to confirm and nothing to email. Money in the spendable balance starts earning 4% a year the same day.
Two details in that list do almost all the work when something goes wrong, and they are the two people skim past. The amount is exact because it is what identifies your payment. The network is named because the same-looking address on a different chain is somebody else's.
Everything below is a way of failing one of those five steps.
Match the symptom to the cause
Before you write to anyone, look at two screens: your wallet or a block explorer, and the deposit in your dashboard. The pair of answers narrows eight possibilities down to one.
| What you see | What it almost always means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Credited, but short | Nothing is wrong. The 1% comes out of the amount, not on top of it | Nothing. Check the arithmetic and carry on |
| Nothing on the chain | The transaction was never broadcast. It is still in your wallet | Send it again, properly this time |
| Unconfirmed on the chain | It is in flight. Crediting waits for one network confirmation | Wait. Nothing to click |
| Confirmed, balance flat | The confirmation notice was lost between the chain and us | Give it a few minutes — a sweep catches it |
| You sent a rounded amount | The figure is how a payment is matched to a deposit. Rounded, it matches nothing | Open a ticket with the transaction hash |
| You sent after the countdown | The address stopped being watched when the deposit expired | Open a ticket with the transaction hash |
| Wrong coin or wrong chain | It never reached an address of ours. This is the bad one | Depends on the two chains. Rarely automatic |
| A memo or tag was shown, and omitted | The payment landed in a shared pool with nothing attaching it to you | Open a ticket with the transaction hash |
Notice how the right-hand column splits. Three of these fix themselves and want nothing from you. Four want a human and the transaction hash. One — the wrong chain — is the only one where the honest answer is that it depends. That ratio is worth holding on to: most stalled deposits are not lost, they are unlabelled, and a label can be reattached by hand.
The balance moved, but by less than you sent
This is the single most common report, and it is not a fault. The 1% top-up fee is taken out of the amount as it is credited, not charged on top of it afterwards.
So a $250.00 top-up costs $2.50 and puts $247.50 in your spendable balance. The deposit is complete, the arithmetic is right, and nothing is missing. It surprises people because most services quote a fee as an extra line rather than a deduction.
If you want a round number on the other side, ask for a slightly larger one. This is the table nobody publishes, and it is just the fee run backwards:
| To have at least this much | Ask for a top-up of | You are credited |
|---|---|---|
| $50.00 | $50.51 | $50.00 |
| $100.00 | $101.02 | $100.01 |
| $250.00 | $252.53 | $250.00 |
| $500.00 | $505.06 | $500.01 |
| $1,000.00 | $1,010.11 | $1,000.01 |
The middle column is rounded up on purpose: it is the smallest top-up that cannot leave you short of the figure on the left. Because the fee itself is rounded to the cent before it is taken, two of those rows land a penny above the target rather than exactly on it. The right-hand column is the real credited figure rather than the one you were aiming at — a table that quietly showed the target instead would be wrong twice out of five.
Worth saying plainly, because it is the second half of the same question: that 1% is the only charge on the way in, and there is nothing on the way out. No monthly fee, no inactivity fee, no fee to hold a balance, no fee per payment. The full schedule, and the day the balance has earned the fee back, is in the fees guide.
The amount is the identifier, and rounding breaks it
This is the mechanism that explains most of the triage table, and it takes one paragraph.
Every deposit gets its own address and its own exact figure. The figure is not decoration and it is not a conversion estimate: it is how an incoming payment is matched to the deposit that was expecting it. That is why the amount is shown as text with a copy button rather than as a tidy rounded number — the trailing digits are the label.
Round it off and you have not approximated anything. You have removed the label. The payment arrives, it is real, it is confirmed, and nothing on our side can tell whose it is without a person looking. Which is exactly what a support ticket with a transaction hash is for.
Copy the amount with the button. Retyping is where the digits get lost, and it is a two-second habit that removes a whole class of problem.
The same logic covers the memo or tag. Some chains route every deposit to one shared address and tell payments apart by a short reference. Where the deposit screen shows one, it is not optional — a payment sent without it lands in a common pool with nothing to attach it to. Where no tag is shown, there is nothing to add, and you should not invent one.
The wrong chain is the mistake that is not automatic
Here is the one worth being careful about, because it is the only failure on this page where the money may genuinely be out of reach.
7 funding options are offered: Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, Tether (ERC-20), Tether (TRC-20), Litecoin, TRON. Tether appears twice on purpose, and that pair is where this goes wrong most often — an ERC-20 payment sent to a TRC-20 address, or the reverse. The two are not interchangeable, they simply look alike.
What makes it different from everything else here is that the payment never reached an address of ours at all. There is no deposit sitting unlabelled, waiting to be matched. Whether anything can be done depends entirely on which two chains are involved, and it is never automatic. Keep the transaction hash and open a ticket; do not assume either way until someone has looked.
The prevention is almost insultingly simple, and it is the reason the deposit screen spells the network out in words instead of leaving you to infer it from the address format: read the network line before you paste the address. Not after. Which of the two Tether networks you actually want, and how to tell them apart in your own wallet, is a guide of its own.
The same applies to sending a coin that is not on the list at all. An unsupported asset arriving at an address built for a different one is the same problem wearing a different hat.
Confirmed on the chain, flat in the dashboard
The explorer says confirmed. The balance has not moved. This looks like the worst case and is almost always the mildest one.
Give it a few minutes first. Confirmation and crediting are two events, and the second one follows a notification that occasionally goes missing in transit — a dropped callback, a momentary outage, ordinary plumbing.
That is a known failure mode rather than a surprise, so it is handled by design: a reconciliation pass runs on a schedule and picks up deposits whose confirmation notice never arrived. A payment that genuinely landed on the right address, for the right amount, gets credited by that sweep even when the live notification failed. You do not have to trigger it and you do not have to ask for it.
While you wait, the deposit itself is the place to look — in the dashboard, or over the API with GET /api/v1/topups/{reference} under the topups:read scope. The field that answers the question is credited_at: while it is null the money is not yet spendable, and when it carries a timestamp it is. The API guide covers polling it properly.
If the sweep has run and the deposit is still sitting there, you are no longer in this section — check the amount you actually sent against the amount you were asked for, because that is the next most likely explanation.
The address expired, and that is deliberate
A deposit does not stay open forever. When the countdown on the screen runs out, the deposit is marked expired and its address stops being watched.
This reads like an obstacle and is actually a safety rail. An address nobody is watching is an address that cannot quietly accept a payment nobody will ever match. Expiring it is how the system tells you, in advance, that this particular route is closed — rather than swallowing your money in silence and leaving you to discover it later.
Which gives two rules, and they are the whole section:
- If the countdown ran out before you sent, do not send. Open a new deposit. You get a fresh address and a fresh amount, and it takes seconds.
- Never reuse an address from an earlier deposit. Each one is valid for the deposit it was issued for and nothing else. A wallet's address book is genuinely dangerous here — the entry you saved last month points at a door that is no longer answered.
If you sent to an expired address before reading this, it is a ticket rather than a loss: the payment is on a real address, it simply arrived after anyone stopped listening. Keep the hash.
Making the next deposit boring
Everything above collapses into a short habit. None of it is clever, and together it removes seven of the eight failures on this page.
- Copy the amount with the button, never by retyping it. The trailing digits are the label on your payment.
- Read the network line out loud before pasting the address. One second, and it is the only failure here that may not be reversible.
- Copy the memo or tag if one is shown, and add nothing if none is.
- Send while the countdown is still running. If it has run out, open a new deposit instead of sending anyway.
- Keep the transaction hash until the balance moves. It is what identifies your payment if anything needs reconciling by hand, and it costs nothing to have.
- Expect the credited figure to be smaller than the amount you asked for, by 1%.
And if something still stalls: open a ticket under A deposit with the transaction hash, and say what you sent and what you were asked to send. Those two figures side by side answer the question faster than anything else you could write. Shorter answers to the same questions live in the help center.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a crypto deposit take to be credited?
It is credited automatically after one network confirmation, which is minutes on most chains. There is nothing to click and nothing to confirm — the balance simply moves. If the chain shows the transaction as still unconfirmed, you are waiting on the network rather than on us.
My deposit was credited but the amount is less than I sent. Why?
That is the 1% top-up fee, and it is taken out of the amount rather than added on top. A $250.00 top-up costs $2.50 and credits $247.50. If you want a round figure spendable, ask for a slightly larger top-up — $101.02 credits $100.01, so you are never left short. It is the only charge on the way in, and there is none on the way out.
The blockchain says confirmed but my balance has not moved. What now?
Give it a few minutes. Confirmation and crediting are two separate events, and the notice between them occasionally goes missing. A reconciliation pass runs on a schedule and picks up deposits whose confirmation notice was lost in transit, so a payment that really landed gets credited even when the live notification failed. You do not need to trigger it.
I sent a different amount than the one shown. Is the money lost?
No, but it will not credit automatically. The exact figure is how a payment is matched to the deposit expecting it, so an amount that does not match has nothing attaching it to your account. It needs a person to reconcile it — open a ticket under A deposit and include the transaction hash, which is what identifies your payment.
I sent the wrong coin, or used the wrong network. Can it be recovered?
Sometimes, and never automatically. Tether on the wrong network is the common case — ERC-20 sent to a TRC-20 address, or the reverse. Because the payment never reached an address of ours, recovery depends entirely on which two chains are involved. Keep the transaction hash and open a ticket rather than assuming either way. The reliable prevention is reading the network line before pasting the address.
What happens if I send to a deposit address after it expired?
It will not credit on its own, because an expired deposit stops being watched. The payment is not lost — it is on a real address, it simply arrived after anyone was listening for it — so it is a ticket with the transaction hash rather than a write-off. If the countdown has run out and you have not sent yet, do not: open a new deposit and use the fresh address and amount.
Can I reuse a deposit address from last time?
No. Each deposit gets its own address, valid for that deposit only, and reusing an old one means sending into an address nobody is watching. This is worth being careful about precisely because wallets make it easy — a saved address book entry points at a door that is no longer answered.
I forgot the memo or tag. What happens to the payment?
Some chains route every deposit to one shared address and tell payments apart by that reference, so a payment sent without it lands in a common pool with nothing attaching it to you. It needs reconciling by hand, with the transaction hash. Where the deposit screen shows no tag, there is nothing to add and you should not invent one.
Where do I follow a deposit while it is in progress?
In the dashboard, on the top-up itself. Over the API, GET /api/v1/topups/{reference} returns the same thing under the topups:read scope. The field to watch is credited_at — while it is null the money is not spendable yet, and when it carries a timestamp it is.
Is there a minimum or maximum deposit?
Minimum $100 for your first top-up and $100 for every one after, up to $100,000 in a single deposit. The first-deposit minimum is higher because that deposit is also what activates your card.
Product references and further reading
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