- How often
- Every few weeks, and ideally after every completed order.
- How long
- A few minutes plus ordinary confirmation time.
- What it prevents
- Losing funds to something entirely ordinary: a lost account, an outage, a platform ending, or your own attention lapsing.
- If you skip it
- Money accumulates somewhere you have stopped watching, held by a party you cannot identify.
- How you notice you stopped
- You do not know, without looking, what the balance currently is.
What a parked balance actually is
Money handed to a platform and not committed to anything. It is not in escrow, because escrow governs orders. It is not protected by the signing arrangement, because nothing has been contracted. Every protection described anywhere on this site attaches to an order, and a balance has no order attached.
What can happen to it
| Event | How likely | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Your account is lost | Far more likely than the platform failing | Gone with the account |
| Your attention lapses | Very likely over months | Nothing, until one of the others happens |
| An extended outage | Occasional | Not a loss, and a stretch where you cannot reach your own money |
| The platform ends | Unpredictable | Gone. Every market that ended looked healthy first. |
The fee argument, answered
It is the one real argument for leaving funds in place, so it deserves a direct answer. Each withdrawal pays a network fee measured in fractions of a cent. Leaving money there to avoid it buys convenience with an unbounded downside to save an amount too small to write down. That is not a close comparison.
The check before confirming
Compare the first and last several characters of the destination against your own wallet. The ends, not the middle, because the failure here is wholesale substitution by something on your machine rather than a resembling address. It takes three seconds and it is the only thing standing between a mistake and a payment nobody can recall.