Recently, when the on-chain network gets congested, you really get to feel that trading isn’t as simple as “click once and it’s done.” The moment you broadcast it, you’re just getting into the mempool line. Whoever is willing to pay higher fees, or whoever is more urgent, gets to go first. As for you, you might end up stuck—either waiting around, paying more to push the transaction through, or having it dropped altogether. The most unbearable part is thinking you’ve gotten it done, only to find a few minutes later that it was never actually confirmed on-chain—your mindset just collapses.

Seeing the recent back-and-forth among Layer2 about arguing over TPS, fees, subsidies, and the like, I actually care even more about this kind of “peak-time experience”: low fees but chaotic queues, and lots of retry attempts after failures—it’s pretty torturous, honestly. Anyway, my current approach is pretty timid. When it’s congested, I don’t make any moves. If I really do need to act, I first think through slippage and the consequences of failures. No matter how tempting the returns are, don’t shove yourself into uncertainty.