Deposit Sweeping

Deposit sweeping is the back-office process by which an exchange moves incoming customer deposits out of the many individual deposit addresses and into a smaller set of operational wallets. A typical setup keeps a hot wallet online with only enough balance to service ordinary withdrawals, and sends the remainder to cold storage that requires offline or multi-party approval to spend. Sweeping costs network fees, so platforms often batch it or wait for a threshold, which is one reason a deposit address may show a zero balance shortly after crediting. For customers the practical consequence is that the coins backing a balance sit in shared platform wallets, not at your address, which is why custody arrangements and reserve disclosures matter.