Your withdrawal address is the address that you are withdrawing your funds to when making a withdrawal. Whitelisting a withdrawal address is the process of limiting the addresses that you can make withdrawals to.
You can find this security setting under Account > Security > Withdrawal Address Whitelist.
While whitelisting withdrawals to predefined addresses or disabling withdrawals for currencies is a good security improvement in itself, it will only be a true security improvement if you lock all addresses for all currencies.
For example, if you whitelist your Bitcoin address but do not disable your other addresses, such as Litecoin, and if your account was compromised by an attacker, they could simply withdraw your funds via Litecoin.
Important: Therefore, if you wish toincrease the level of security of your account by whitelisting addresses, it will only help if all addresses are locked.
Note: You can use the Toggle button to turn on or off all withdrawal addresses quickly.
Withdrawal addresses and withdrawal holds
— Why do I have a withdrawal hold after changing the withdrawal address settings?
Removing addresses or changing the whitelisted withdrawal addresses on your Bitfinex account will trigger an automatic withdrawal hold of five days for all currencies.
During this period, no withdrawals will be processed. This five-day withdrawal hold is only applied when re-enabling disabled withdrawals for a currency or modifying an existing whitelisted address. This is because it marginally reduces your withdrawal security.
Note: No five-day hold is applied when disabling withdrawals or adding whitelisted addresses since these actions increase withdrawal security marginally.
— How does a withdrawal hold protect my account?
Withdrawal hold is an essential part of why the whitelisted addresses help improve security. If an account is compromised and the attackers want to withdraw to an address under their control, they will need to remove the whitelisted withdrawals. However, they will not quickly transfer funds out to a new address because a five-day withdrawal hold will have been triggered.
At this time, the account owner would have a chance to notice the breached security during these five days and would be able to freeze their account, thereby protecting it.
Important: If you need to make a withdrawal to a new address, keep this in mind and be aware you will not be able to do so for five days after changing the locked addresses.
If you have any inquiries, please feel free to contact Bitfinex Support. We are happy to help!
