Bitcoin Stopped Waiting for a Block and Solana Lost Its Memo. What Both Changes Did

Two numbers we published in September aged faster than we expected. A Bitcoin payment took a median of 14 minutes and 16 seconds. Solana completed about ten points below the rest of the same merchant’s checkout.

Both were true for the year we measured, and neither describes the checkout today.

Two things changed late in that year. On 28 May 2026 we started accepting Bitcoin payments of up to 100 EUR before they confirm on chain. On 21 July every Solana order got its own payment address, and the memo went. Here is what each change did, measured the same way as before.

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Bitcoin: what accepting before the block means

A Bitcoin payment normally counts once a block includes it. Blocks arrive about every ten minutes on average, and most of the wait after a shopper presses send is exactly that.

Zero-confirmation acceptance does not wait for the block. When the payment appears on the network, a specialist provider checks it, and if it clears, we accept it there and then. The shopper sees the invoice paid and you see the order paid while the transaction is still on its way into a block.

We switched it on for Bitcoin payments of up to 100 EUR. Not every payment clears the check, and the ones that do not wait for a confirmation, as before. For now, payments above 100 EUR always wait.

Bitcoin: what it did

Payments of up to 100 EUR make up about five in six of the on-chain Bitcoin orders we process, so the change moved the whole Bitcoin median, from nearly 15 minutes to 7. Above 100 EUR nothing changed, which is what the limit predicts.

The tail shrank as well. Before the change, 29.0% of Bitcoin payments up to 100 EUR took longer than twenty minutes. In the four weeks from 31 August it was 14.1%. In the weeks before 28 May, fewer than one in twenty of those payments was paid inside five minutes. Every week since 31 August, more than half have been.

It did not arrive in a straight line. The median fell in the first week, and in two stretches, the week of 6 July and 17 to 30 August, more payments went back to waiting for a block. From 31 August it has held steady.

One thing it did not change is how often a Bitcoin checkout gets paid. The share of shoppers who pick Bitcoin and then pay barely moved. Faster confirmation makes the wait shorter for the people who pay. It does not seem to make many more people pay.

Lightning is still the fastest way to pay in Bitcoin, at a median of 46 seconds across the year. We have been tracking its share of Bitcoin payments for years.

Solana: what changed

Until 21 July, Solana payments went to a shared address, and a memo told us which order each payment belonged to. When a wallet or exchange dropped the memo, or the shopper typed it wrong, the payment arrived without a label and we could not attach it to the order. The invoice also kept the address behind a QR code, so that the address and the memo travelled together.

Since 21 July every Solana order gets its own address. There is no memo, and the address sits on the invoice as text, ready to copy. The address now identifies the payment on its own, which is the principle behind dedicated deposit addresses as well.

Solana: what it did

Completion is the share of orders that got paid once the shopper had picked SOL, counting orders later refunded as paid. Litecoin, the best performer in our completion data, is there for comparison.

Solana closed a thirty-point gap to Litecoin within a month of the change.

A jump like that could be a mix effect, where a few big merchants who happen to do well with Solana start carrying more of it. So we ran the test we used before, comparing Solana with the rest of the same merchant’s checkout, for every merchant with at least 100 Solana orders and 100 other orders in the period.

Before 21 July, Solana completed below the rest of the checkout at most of those merchants, by a median of 12.9 points, and did better at only 14% of them. After 21 July it did better at 96%, by a median of 9.7 points. Fewer merchants clear the bar in a window of two months, so read the second figure as a direction, but it points the same way as the whole-checkout number.

The slow tail went with it. Before 21 July, 3.86% of paid Solana payments took longer than twenty minutes. Since then it has been 0.35%. The median moved slightly the other way, from 64 seconds to about 80, and we are reporting that as we found it.

What to change on your side

• Nothing to switch on. Both changes run on our side.
• Update your support macros. Most Bitcoin payments of up to 100 EUR are now paid within five minutes, but about one in five still takes longer than fifteen. A pending Bitcoin order at fifteen minutes is still normal, at any amount.
• Stop asking customers for a Solana memo. If your help pages or order emails tell people to add one, take the line out.
• Look again at Solana. If you have been steering customers away from it because of the numbers we published in September, that reason has gone.

Method

Every figure comes from our own order data, pulled on 30 September 2026. Bitcoin times are the payment clock, from the moment the shopper picks the network to the moment the order is paid, for paid orders on the Bitcoin network, split at an order value of 100 EUR. Solana completion covers orders where the shopper picked SOL, by the month the order was created. Solana times cover paid orders on the Solana network, SOL and tokens together. Medians are approximate quantiles, so the last second can move between pulls. The full-year figures these update are in how long a crypto payment takes and which assets get paid, and both posts now carry a note about these changes.

Two of the slowest corners of our checkout got quicker this summer, and neither needed anything from the merchants using it. If you chose your networks on the strength of what we published in September, it is worth a second look.

Thinking your checkout could keep up with your customers? Start with us.