Unshielding BTC pending

Hi! I sent some Bitcoin to a wallet I trust over a day ago. The transaction says complete on the Incognito side, but the wallet I transferred to has not received anything yet. Could I have some help on this, please?

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What is the transaction hash? Did you check on the BTC blockchain about your transaction? If you click on the transaction in the Incognito App, it should give you more details like the transaction hash on the BTC side.

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The btc network is very very congested right now… it will eventually clear up. Check out chain transaction link and there’s a button on the blockcypher explorer above the confidence label and it will tell you how many mempools your txn is sitting in. I’m going through a similar situation

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Hey guys, due to the BTC network congestion, some unshielding transactions may not land at your external address yet, or it is unable to track on the blockchain explorer.

No worries! Our devs are already aware of this and all pending transactions will resume once the traffic jams gets eased! :grin:

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Cool, thank you!

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The same has happened to me yesterday. Does your transaction appear on other blockchain explorers (blockchain.com, tradeblock, mempool.space)? Mine only appeared on blockcypher and after about 20 hours it just disappeared from there too. I’ve contacted support who said the dev team is on it, but haven’t heard from them since. There seems to be something going on with BTC unshielding.

So even after paying very high withdraw/unshielding fee incognito is not using that fee to send the BTC (instead submitting it with a lower fee)?

Or the app estimated it wrong (which happens sometimes but usually apps estimate way high)?

Can’t speak for the others, but in my case it seemed like the transaction was invalid altogether. I paid the normal fee which at that time was 60sats/vB, but the transaction was never even visible on most explorers, only on BlockCypher.

This is not just a problem with confirmations taking longer because of insufficient fees, it looks like these transactions are just not validated and picked up by the vast majority of nodes, they don’t even make it to the mempool.

To be clear, the app shows the real-time estimated fee at the time you make the transfer out of the network.
There will be a period of time when your pBTC was converted to BTC. In the case there are many previous transactions (before yours) got processed in that time, the fee of your pending one will become normal/ or low and it is not processed.
That’s why we are trying to re-try all the transactions on our end in batch. Hopefully it can be done in the next 24 hours.

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Thanks for shedding some light on the issue @Peter.

If the holdup is happening at the pBTC → BTC conversion, wouldn’t one of the Incognito transaction show up as incomplete?

What I’m seeing is both Mainnet transactions (TxID, Inchain TxID) marked as successful and a non longer existing BTC transaction.

I’d love to see custom fees, especially with bitcoin. Because there could be 1000 pending transactions at once, there is really little reason not to let the user choose what fee he/she wants to pay.

But with BTC, I just don’t see how it can take over 24 hours. I regularly put something like 3-5 sats and they will confirm within 24 hours. There should be no reason they aren’t broadcasted—and therefore in the mempool and viewable by the world as pending. Even then the user could do a child-pays-parent if their transaction was urgent.

you can, just tap the arrow. there’s normal/high. in times of high congestion, choosing normal can result in delayed transactions, because by the time the process is in its final stages (sent), the fee has changed. when that happens, we need to cover the difference and retry it, which takes longer.

there are 2 reasons why BTC fees quoted in the app are conservatively estimated at the higher ranges (according to the API from the Bitcoin blockchain), and why the whole process can take longer than a simple tx on the Bitcoin blockchain.

  1. there is not just 1 tx in this process, but actually 3 actions, each incurring their respective network fees and processing times. 1) transfer pBTC to one-time address 2) burn pBTC, 3) release BTC from holding address and transfer to your unshielding address.

  2. For the above reasons, high congestion, changing fee requirements, and large numbers of UTXOs can cause back ups. so no, there should not be thousands of pending transactions at once, because that would be miserable.

this is not to say that the process cannot be optimized (and will be), but i wanted to shed some light on what is currently going on behind the scenes.

you can see the fee paid in your unshield tx detail screen, and compare it with what you see on the btc explorer. we’ll split it into inchain fee/outchain fee if that makes it visually easier to digest. i also want to clarify that if a user pays X, at least X will always be paid. If by the time of execution the necessary fee is higher, the core team covers the difference.

i think the statuses are wrong here. it shouldn’t show complete, and after it’s done its in-network journey, the status should be 1 out-chain confirmation, 2 out-chain confirmation… etc. ‘complete’ should only be seen when it’s actually been received by you. thanks for pointing this out, we’ll look into it.

@marko @rejimex861, we’ll split the fee and status in the tx detail screen, like we do in-chain and out-chain tx. so you guys can follow the process better. thanks for the feedback.

this can happen if gas is too low, or if there’s a UTXO issue along the way. if a tx fails/is stuck, it is then retried with a higher fee (covered by incognito). your transaction should resume soon. there’s a bit of a backlog at the moment. thanks for being patient.

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Update: my transaction has completed. I hope that means everyone else’s either has or will go through soon as well!

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Thanks @ning for taking the time to break it down.

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This morning a new transaction was generated and my unshielding completed. Thanks again to @Ducky, @Peter and @ning for their transparency and help.

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What you pay incognito has nothing to do with what they pay for the miner fee. Yes I guess they are linked but I’d assume they will make a little profit (I honestly never compared because I am happy paying a fee for a service) the problem is the miner fee is changing so much with this volatility and the btc bridge is … well… how should I put this… very stingy with the fees paid to the miners lol so your transaction will prob get forgotten by the network for a few days til the mempool returns to normal. I have proposed a solution to this in another post but I want to also add that if the team uses a segwit btc address for their gateway they will pay less fees per byte in general (food for thought)

@ning wait we can choose a higher btc shield out miner fee!? Lol I’ve been wanting this

Ahh yes!! They need to add a segwit bridge. That will save a LOT.

Maybe that’s why I’m always paying 5 sat/byte and I get a confirmation within 24 hours but incongito pays 150 sats/byte and it has problems for days.

@ning Is there any reason why incongito still uses legacy btc addresses by default? Actually, why not use only segwit bc1 style addresses?

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This is why I believe and have faith as I do in Incognito…because of these 3 individuals to begin with and how they communicate and explain things and are honest in their responses…Thank you Ducky, Peter, and Ning for the wonderful work you all do… :sunglasses:

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Hey Peter.

I sent some btc to the addy provided on app. The transaction isn’t showing as usual but the coins have arrived and been confirmed. Coins are not showing on app.

Hello @Stimmy,

Unfortunately Peter is no longer active here.

Did you send more than the minimum amount of BTC as indicated in the app?

How long has it been since you sent the funds?

Please also send the transaction ID

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