Crypto payment confirmations explained

A confirmation is one block mined on top of the block containing your payment. It is the only thing standing between "seen" and "final".

Reversing a payment means rewriting every block above it, so each additional confirmation multiplies the cost of an attack. That is why the number is a security parameter and not a performance setting — lowering it does not make payments faster, it makes them cheaper to reverse.

Different networks need different counts because they are secured differently. Unheld enforces a threshold per network rather than one number for all of them.