Recently the chain has been clogged, and when I send a transaction it feels like I’m queuing up for a number in the mempool: first it gets stuffed into a “waiting room,” and miners/packagers only care about whose tip is juicier—plainly speaking, it’s gas. If you bid too low, you just get left hanging the whole time. And even later transactions with the same nonce can end up blocking you, like you can’t even cleanly cancel—your mindset just totally breaks down.

The airdrop season is even crazier. Everyone does tasks like clocking in for work, and the platforms also run anti-bot/anti-witchcraft measures with a points system. The result is that a bunch of scripts end up competing with each other, and it even blows up normal users’ transactions… I’ve seen plenty of project teams that are really good at drawing big promises—but once the token model is rolled out, they basically force you to “front-run + bump the gas,” and the experience is exactly as bad as it sounds.

Next time, I’ll probably: not go head-on with the peak rush. If I really need to send, I’ll just set a reasonable gas cap plus a timeout for resending. For you, do you usually just wait, or would you rather spend a bit more money to buy certainty?