While this is about exchanges, I want to make a short story long so I'm adding the backstory too.
Last night I wanted to buy some IOTA. I'm really interested in Internet of Things and have a few sensors I might want to sell the data from. I wanted to buy someone else's data first and see what it was all about. I needed some IOTA.
Unfortunately, IOTA is not traded on my exchange.
It took almost three and a half hours for my money to leave the exchange. This time does not include the time for confirmations, just BTC leaving the exchange. I initiated an exchange to exchange transfer at 5:00 pm and at 8:30 pm it hit the bitcoin mempool.
Now moving on from the facts to my wildly speculative personal thoughts that I have absolutely no evidence to support.
The obvious answer is there was a lot going on last night. Bitcoin was up around 20%. But I think I can do better.
First, I'll give the exchange the benefit of the doubt, maybe they tried to send my transaction out immediately but there was so much traffic that it did not hit the mempool and they tried and tried till it hit. Highly unlikely, but in a world where people spend serious Ether on crypto kitties anything is possible.
Next possible scenario and with a sunny side bent. This could be a good thing. Maybe the exchanges are ensuring they are not over leveraged and have a conservative amount of bitcoin and cash on hand and this is just how it plays out in high volume times.
Next, this could be a leading indicator that the exchanges information systems can't handle the scale of new customers or trading volume. In this case, they might want to consider holding off on adding new customers, but that is usually a very hard idea to sell in any organization. Customers will just sign up on another exchange.
Last, maybe the exchange is prioritizing giving coin to new users over coins leaving their network. In this case, that makes me sad.