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Poloniex Requires 2,000 Confirmations for Bytecoin Transactions

Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:10 PM
P. H. Madore
Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:10 PM

If you want to trade Bytecoin on Poloniex, you’re going to have to wait a significant amount of time, CCN.com has learned.

This reporter decided to enter the BCH pre-fork trading at the exchange and wanted to use his Bytecoin holdings as part of that process. He withdrew them from where they were held and properly made the deposit, using the payment ID required by Poloniex and paying the requisite transaction fees. Hours after other deposits had cleared and coins had been converted to pre-fork BCHABC and BCHSV tokens, the Bytecoin had still not arrived.

In Bytecoin standard transactions, 10 confirmations is considered confirmed. This is 4 more than most cryptocurrencies, and occasionally blocks hang for sometime as a result of a sometimes unreliable mining network which switches between Monero, Bytecoin, and other CryptoNight coins. So after somewhere between 6 and 10 hours, this reporter became concerned.

Had he clipped the payment ID or the address, or something? Entirely possible. So he checks – no, that’s correct. Not seeing the deposit, he contacted Poloniex support, and got the following response:

Hi Paul,

Thanks for reaching out!

The minimum confirmations for BCN have been increased temporarily (to 2000) due to network instability. As a result, BCN deposits may take longer than usual to be available.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.

Best,

Poloniex Support Team

3.5 Day Deposit

2000 confirmations. At time of writing, Bytecoin had about 24 blocks in the past hour. Sometimes they happen within a minute of each other, and sometimes they happen hours apart. But if 24/hour is a normal rate, that would mean a deposit time of nearly 84 hours – 3 ½ days.

The author’s deposit was not even halfway there at time of writing.

Poloniex is one of the major exchanges that lists Bytecoin, but not the only. Had the author known of the “temporary” change in confirmation requirement, which support did not explain in any more detail, he could have used another such exchange to convert to BCH in advance of the fork. As things stand, he might be cutting it mightily close.

For those wondering what Bytecoin is, it is the first implementation of the CryptoNight/CryptoNote  protocol. Initially, Monero was a fork of Bytecoin, although at this point it would be fair to say that Monero has taken the lead in terms of development in both technical and market manners. Both coins are considered “privacy coins.”