How long does a crypto payment actually take?

Confirmation time by network

These are the ranges to plan around under ordinary conditions. Congestion moves them, and a fee set too low moves them a great deal more.

Two things follow from that table. The first is that if you are choosing a coin partly on speed, almost everything except on-chain Bitcoin is fast enough that the difference does not matter. The second is that if you have been waiting half an hour on a network listed here in minutes, the delay is not confirmation — it is something else, and the rest of this page is about finding which.

The clock people actually experience

Confirmation is one segment of a longer sequence, and usually the shortest. Laid end to end, a realistic first-time purchase looks like this.

Why nobody in this market can honestly say "instant"

Sellers advertise instant delivery constantly, and the claim does not survive contact with how the product works. Anthropic sells gift subscriptions through its own checkout, to be bought by an existing Pro or Max subscriber. There is no bulk API and no automated wholesale channel, so somewhere in every one of these transactions a person is buying a gift by hand.

• A code delivered in seconds was bought before your order existed — meaning it was purchased speculatively and has been sitting somewhere, with its 365-day expiry already running.
• It may have been bought with a card that can still be charged back, which is the mechanism behind codes that stop working weeks later.
• Or the "instant" part is an automated email containing a code that is fulfilled later, or not at all.
• We publish a 12-hour window and usually beat it by a wide margin. The window is honest precisely because it accounts for a human step that genuinely exists.

This is not an argument that slower is better. It is an argument that a delivery promise faster than the underlying process should tell you something about the process, and the thing it usually tells you is that the inventory is pre-bought.

If your payment seems stuck

1. Find the transaction hash in your wallet or exchange history. Every useful next step depends on having it, and if there is no hash the transaction was never broadcast.
2. Paste it into the block explorer for the network you actually sent on. If it shows as confirmed, the money has moved and the question becomes where it went.
3. Check the network you sent on against the network named on the invoice. A mismatch is the most common cause of a payment that confirms but never arrives.
4. Check the amount. An underpayment — often caused by the exchange deducting its withdrawal fee from the amount you typed — leaves an invoice partially paid rather than complete.
5. If it confirmed, on the right network, for the right amount, and the order still has not moved, send us the hash. That is enough to reconcile it manually.

Practical timing advice

• Renewing? Order three to five days before the term ends. A same-tier gift extends a running term rather than overlapping it, so nothing is wasted by being early.
• Buying for the first time, use a stablecoin on a fast network. It removes both the confirmation wait and the price drift in one decision.
• Generate the invoice when you are ready to send, not before. A volatile coin quoted twenty minutes ago can underpay by the time it lands.
• Acquire the coin before you create the order if you are buying on an exchange for the first time, because the withdrawal hold is the longest single step and it is entirely invisible until you hit it.
• Do not send a second transaction because the first is taking a while. Two payments against one invoice is a slower problem to unpick than waiting.