Recently, I’ve been staring at block times while pulling data, and the more I look, the more I feel: you think you’re “watching on-chain,” but a lot of the time you’re really just watching the mood of a certain node/RPC… If the RPC gets busy or the cache hasn’t updated, your wallet balance, NFTs, and even your transaction status can all be delayed by half a beat. Indexers are even more exaggerated—charts look like real-time data, but in reality they’re already several minutes behind.

These past couple of days there haven’t been mainstream public chain upgrades/maintenance going on—everyone in the group is guessing whether projects will migrate. To be blunt, it doesn’t matter whether they migrate or not. Just in that stretch before and after the upgrade, if your RPC can’t keep up, the “on-chain data” you see starts to look more like a delayed live stream, and it’s easy to get startled.

My current cheap fix: for the same tx, check it against at least two different RPCs/browsers, and before any critical operation, first confirm whether the latest block height is stuck… so your emotions don’t get led astray by fake delays. What about you?