Crypto payment delays — when your key hasn't arrived

Crypto payments don't deliver the key the instant you click Pay — we wait for network confirmation first to avoid double-spend risk. Here's the timeline you should expect, and what to do if your payment seems stuck.

Expected timing per network.

• Bitcoin (BTC). 1 confirmation required. Median time to first confirmation on mainnet is about 10 minutes, but the actual range is 2-30 minutes depending on network congestion. On a fee-spike day (Ordinals mint, NFT mania), it can be 45-60 minutes. SellAuth shows the live mempool confirmation count on the checkout page.
• Ethereum (ETH). 12 confirmations required. ETH blocks finalize every ~12 seconds, so 12 confirmations is ~2.5 minutes in normal conditions. On a network-congestion day it can stretch to 5-10 minutes.
• USDC on Ethereum. Same as ETH — 12 confirmations, same ~2.5 minute baseline.

Step 1: confirm the broadcast. Open the SellAuth checkout page (the tab you were on when you sent the payment). It shows the deposit address and the expected amount. Paste the deposit address into a block explorer (mempool.space for BTC, etherscan.io for ETH/USDC). If your transaction appears in the explorer, the payment was broadcast successfully — now you're just waiting for confirmations.

Step 2: wait for the confirmation count. The explorer will show 0 confs initially, ticking up to 1 (for BTC) or 12 (for ETH/USDC). The email and key delivery fire when the count hits the threshold. Refresh your inbox; the SellAuth confirmation email usually arrives within 60 seconds of the threshold being reached.

Step 3: "my payment confirmed but no email". Two common causes. (a) The email is in your spam folder — search for noreply@sellauth.com. (b) You typed a slightly-different email at checkout than the one you usually use; check the SellAuth checkout page tab — it shows the email address the receipt is being sent to. If you typo'd, email getnimbuscontact@gmail.com with the txid and the correct email and we'll resend within an hour.

Step 4: "my payment confirmed but the dashboard shows no order". Sign into the dashboard at /dashboard using the email you typed at checkout. The order may have landed under a slightly different account than the one you usually use. If the dashboard still shows nothing 15 minutes after on-chain confirmation, open a ticket with your txid and the email on checkout — we'll reconcile manually.

Underpayment / overpayment. If you sent more or less than the exact amount SellAuth showed, the payment lands in a manual-reconciliation queue instead of auto-fulfilling. Email getnimbuscontact@gmail.com with the txid; we handle these within the day.

Wrong network. If you sent USDC on Polygon, Arbitrum, or Tron — or BTC on a Lightning channel — when the checkout asked for ETH mainnet or BTC L1, the payment will not fulfil automatically and may be lost. Open a ticket; we can sometimes recover cross-chain, but not always. Always pick the network the checkout asks for.

Genuinely stuck on-chain (RBF, low-fee transactions). If your BTC transaction is stuck because you set the fee too low, you can use RBF (Replace-By-Fee) to bump the fee from your wallet. Most modern wallets (Sparrow, BlueWallet, Phoenix) support this. Once the bumped transaction confirms, the SellAuth side recognizes it and fulfills.