"Email delivery in about 11 minutes" is the headline number across this catalog. It's an average across all coins and all brands, and it hides a lot of moving parts. This is the breakdown of what's happening between the moment you broadcast your Bitcoin transaction and the moment a delivery email lands in your inbox.
Minute 0: The deposit broadcast
You hit "Pay" in your wallet, the wallet builds and signs the transaction, and broadcasts it to the network. For Bitcoin, this means it hits the mempool. For Monero it hits the Monero mempool. For Solana it hits a leader's slot. The transaction is now public (or, for XMR, public-but-opaque) but not yet confirmed.
Our pay page picks up the transaction within 5–15 seconds via the rate engine's polling. The status flips from pending to confirming.
Minutes 1–9: Chain confirmation
This is where most of the eleven minutes go, and where the variance lives.
- Bitcoin: one confirmation typically, six required for orders above the equivalent of ~$5,000. One confirmation = one block = an average of ten minutes, but in practice anywhere from 2 minutes (lucky block timing) to 40+ minutes (high mempool fees, low fee rate, congestion). The wallet's chosen fee rate matters — pay too little and your tx gets buried.
- Monero: ten confirmations, two-minute block time = ~20 minutes. XMR is the slowest coin in the catalog by design (the privacy properties require deeper confirmation depth to be meaningful).
- Ethereum / USDT-ERC20: 12 confirmations, ~12 seconds per block = ~2.5 minutes total. Fast.
- USDT-TRC20 (Tron): 19 confirmations, ~3 second blocks = ~1 minute. Fastest.
- USDT-SPL (Solana) / SOL: 32 confirmations finality, sub-second blocks = under a minute.
- Litecoin: ~6 confirmations, 2.5-minute blocks = ~15 minutes.
- Dogecoin: 20 confirmations, 1-minute blocks = ~20 minutes.
- BNB: 15 confirmations, ~3-second blocks = ~45 seconds.
The 11-minute average is exactly that — an average. A USDT-TRC20 payment for a Steam code can complete in 90 seconds end-to-end. A Bitcoin payment during a fee-spike day can take 35 minutes. A Monero payment is reliably ~20 minutes.
Minute 9: Rate engine confirms, code provisioned
When the chain reports the required confirmations, the rate engine flips the invoice to confirmed. Our backend picks up the webhook within 2–5 seconds. The order is now in the "needs fulfilment" state.
Fulfilment depends on the brand. Most are auto-fulfilled: the operator's voucher API (Bitrefill / Tillo / Reloadly / direct brand APIs) returns a fresh, never-redeemed code straight into our database. The order goes from paid to fulfilled with the code attached. This typically takes 100–500 milliseconds.
A subset of brands is currently manually fulfilled: an operator picks a code from a stored lot and enters it into the order. Manual fulfilment runs business hours in CET timezone and adds 1–4 minutes during business hours, more if you order at 4am.
Minute 10: Email build
The fulfilment system queues a delivery email. The email contains: the order number, the brand name and variant, the claim code, the redemption URL specific to that variant (amazon.com/gc, store.steampowered.com/account/redeemwalletcode, etc.), and a link to the private order page that stays accessible for 14 days.
Email is sent through a transactional provider that doesn't track opens, doesn't include pixel beacons, and doesn't get queued behind marketing email. Delivery to the inbox is typically 30–90 seconds.
Minute 11: Inbox
The email lands. The order page on this site simultaneously updates from paid to fulfilled with the code visible. Either path works — open the email, or refresh the order page.
What stretches the eleven minutes
- Bitcoin mempool congestion — most common cause. If the network is busy and you paid the default wallet fee rate (which most wallets undershoot), one confirmation can take 30+ minutes.
- Manual-fulfilment brand at 3am — adds 4–8 hours until the next operator shift. We label these clearly on the product page and only a handful of brands are manual-only.
- Brand voucher API rate-limit — rare but happens during launch promotions. The API queues the request and we deliver as soon as the queue drains. Typically 5–15 minutes.
- Email-provider hiccup — extremely rare. The order page has the code regardless; refreshing it always works even if the email is stuck.
Why we don't promise instant delivery
Several competing crypto-card resellers advertise "instant delivery" as a flat headline. This is misleading. There is no chain that confirms instantly — even Solana's sub-second finality requires more than zero seconds. The honest version is "as fast as the chain allows + 30 seconds of fulfilment + email delivery". For BTC and XMR that's measured in minutes, not seconds. We pick 11 because it's the actual median across all our orders.
Bottom line
Eleven minutes is mostly chain confirmation. Pick a fast coin (USDT-TRC20, Solana, BNB) and you can shave it to under two minutes. Pick Monero and you'll wait closer to twenty for the privacy guarantees. Either way, what you're waiting for is mostly the chain — not us.
Found a region quirk we missed? Tell the desk — /contact.
