Unfortunately withdrawals are taking far longer to be sent out at the moment than we normally aim for, not because we are trying to withhold users their funds, but rather because the blockchains of a number of currencies are having difficulty coping with the increasing number of transactions and associated rising transaction fees.
Because of the enormous amounts of deposits we receive and withdrawal requests we process, the wallet clients are unable to keep up with the number of transactions we need to process. They are being processed, but just not at the speed we normally can.
In the last 7 days, we have received approximately 500,000 individual deposits and about 180,000 individual withdrawal requests. Far more than we normally process. All these deposits, of which a large part very small deposits, need to be recombined in larger inputs in order to efficiently process our users' withdrawals. This process is time-consuming as the hot wallet is saturated with small and unconfirmed inputs.
We cannot simply keep adding larger inputs to our hot wallets in order to keep processing user's withdrawals, because if we would the hot wallet balance would increase even further than they already have. We can also not simply spend all these small, mostly unconfirmed inputs to start processing customer withdrawals, as this would result in users needing to wait for very long periods for their withdrawals to confirm on the blockchain, as the unconfirmed inputs used in these transactions can take days to complete. Mostly because users depositing to Bitfinex not always include sufficient blockchain transaction fees.
This causes a situation where users are kept waiting for their withdrawal to be sent out much longer than would normally be the case. We understand that is very frustrating to users, but we can't really prevent this from happening entirely. This is mostly caused by the current situation where the Bitcoin blockchain is congested and transaction fees are far higher than most users seem to realize. This, in turn, results in many users sending deposits with a relatively low transaction fee which in turn leads to large numbers of unconfirmed inputs.
Please bear with us and your pending withdrawal will be processed.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.