Network Confirmation

A network confirmation is a new block added to the blockchain after the block containing your transaction, and each one makes that transaction progressively harder to reverse.

When you send a deposit, it first gets included in a single block — that's one confirmation. As more blocks are mined or validated on top of it, the transaction becomes more deeply buried in the chain's history, and the probability that it could ever be undone through a chain reorganization drops toward zero. Different networks require different numbers of confirmations before a service treats a deposit as final, based on how that network's consensus mechanism behaves and how often reorganizations have historically occurred. A network with fast, frequent blocks might need more confirmations to reach the same level of security as a network with slower, more final blocks.

This directly affects how long you'll wait after sending a deposit before a swap actually proceeds. It's not unusual for confirmation requirements to vary widely by asset — a few minutes for some networks, closer to an hour for others during periods of congestion. This isn't an arbitrary delay; it's a genuine security measure protecting both you and the exchange partner from a deposit that could still be reversed if accepted too early.

On Zest, the order status page reflects where your deposit is in this process, so you can see whether you're waiting on the network itself or on downstream processing once confirmations are satisfied. If a deposit is taking longer than expected, checking the transaction on a block explorer for that network is the fastest way to see how many confirmations it currently has and how many are required — network congestion, not something wrong with your order, is the most common cause of a longer wait. For asset-by-asset expectations, see the swap confirmation times guide.

Confirmation timing is worth planning around alongside other deposit details — including whether the network you're using needs a memo or destination tag — since a deposit that's both slow to confirm and missing a required field compounds the wait. And because confirmation speed is closely tied to network congestion, it also interacts with gas fees: a transaction sent with too low a fee during a busy period can sit unconfirmed far longer than usual, since it isn't prioritized by validators until the fee becomes competitive.