At Gemini, we pride ourselves on helping you move your money faster. Our unique Instant ACH system lets US-based customers deposit U.S. dollars and trade immediately, a process that used to take up to a week. Last year, we decreased the required number of Bitcoin confirmations for deposits from six to three. And we continue to have industry-leading turnaround times for U.S. dollar wire deposits and withdrawals.

Now, we’re excited to introduce a new first for digital asset exchanges: zero-confirmation pre-credited Bitcoin deposits.

The Problem with Deposit Delays

Due to Bitcoin’s increasing transaction volume but fixed network capacity, it’s taking much longer for transactions to get mined into a block and included in the Blockchain. Transactions tend to get mined faster if their senders pay higher fees, so Gemini uses an aggressive fee algorithm to help your Bitcoin withdrawals get confirmed as soon as possible. We appreciate how important this is to many of our customers, so we include it for free as part of our exchange services.

But while we make sure to set the right transaction fees on your Bitcoin withdrawals, we have no control over the fees on your deposit transactions coming from other exchanges or wallets. Unfortunately, some of those other services aren’t as proactive about paying appropriate transaction fees, and that can cause hours of delays.

Zero-Confirmation Bitcoin Deposits

To help ease these deposit delays, we’re proud to introduce zero-confirmation pre-credited Bitcoin deposits. Here’s how it works: we’re running every Bitcoin deposit on Gemini through a proprietary analysis to determine how likely it is to get confirmed, even if the network is clogged with other transactions. If your transaction passes our criteria (which may take a few minutes), we’ll pre-credit the amount of your deposit and make it available for trading immediately. Our tests show that around two out of three deposits meet the criteria for being pre-credited.

That means that you’ll be able to sell BTC for USD or ETH faster and more efficiently. You can also trade in our daily two-sided auction without a delay due to Bitcoin network congestion. Then, once your deposit eventually reaches its required three confirmations, you’ll be able to withdraw the amount of your deposit or any USD or ETH purchased with your deposit.

This new pre-credit service is already enabled for all of our customers. To find out if your Bitcoin deposit is eligible, just watch out for the “Your Bitcoin Deposit Has Been Pre-Credited” email, or check out the activity feed on the right-hand side of your dashboard whenever you’re signed in to Gemini. It’ll look like this:

Improved Instant ACH

You may have also noticed that this new zero-confirmation BTC deposit feature is pretty similar to our existing Instant ACH system: your funds are available for trading right away, and they become available for withdrawal only once your deposit fully clears. Instant ACH is one of our most popular features, and after listening to your comments and feedback over the last year, we’ve made some changes to how we calculate your “Available for Withdrawal” balance. We think you’ll find the new system much more sensible — especially if you make frequent deposits and trades.

We’re proud to continue to be your bridge to the future of money.

Onward and Upward,

Team Gemini