Just now, my phone popped up a red dot for a transaction confirmation. I tapped it and saw it was still “Pending”… Even though I’d already signed it, the transaction is still queued in the mempool. When the network gets congested, this is what it looks like: everything gets shoved behind a bunch of people, and miners/validators take the ones with fees they can afford to include in the block first. If you set the fee too low, you can only keep waiting. If you wait too long, your transaction might get bumped off/expired, or you can add another fee yourself to “speed it up.” To put it plainly, it’s not that the chain is broken—it’s that everyone is fighting for the same lane.

Recently, some people have been talking about large transfers on-chain, and the movement of an exchange’s hot and cold wallets as signals of “smart money.” But to me, it looks more like this: when everyone is congested, the other side also has to queue up too, and whether it lands depends on the block-inclusion speed. In any case, I mostly do low-frequency transactions plus staking, so if I don’t have to be in a hurry, I won’t rush. Sleeping well is better than chasing those few minutes.