Networks and Transactions

What happens when you press send

A transfer is a signed instruction, not a message to a company. Your wallet signs it with your private key and broadcasts it to the network, where it waits in a queue of unconfirmed transactions. Validators or miners select transactions to include in the next block, generally preferring those offering a higher fee per unit of block space. Inclusion in a block is the first confirmation; each later block makes reversal progressively less plausible.

That single sequence explains most of the questions people arrive with: pending means not yet included, a high fee means competition for block space, and a failed transaction on a smart-contract network can still consume fees because the work was done before the failure.

High-level questions these guides answer

• Why is my transfer pending? It has been broadcast but not yet included in a block, usually because the fee is below what the current queue is clearing.
• Why are fees high right now? Fees reflect demand for limited block space at this moment, not a fixed price list set by anyone.
• Why did my transaction fail and still cost money? On smart-contract networks the network performs work before the failure is known, and that work is paid for.
• Why did funds not arrive on the other side? Most often the transfer was sent on a different network than the receiver expected.
• Is a Layer 2 the same asset? It is the same asset represented on a different network, with different fees, different finality behaviour and different withdrawal mechanics.

A note on live data

We publish current Bitcoin fee conditions because we operate that data pipeline ourselves and document how it is sourced and cached. We do not publish live Ethereum gas figures, because that requires a provider we have not licensed — so our Ethereum page explains the fee mechanism instead of quoting numbers we cannot verify.