I tried sending a cross-chain transaction when the main network was severely congested, and I just watched helplessly as the transaction queued in the mempool: first it got marked with that “pending” status, as a psychological comfort, and then the same crowd of higher-fee transactions cut in line ahead of you. Since miners/validators prioritize the tastiest picks, your transaction just keeps waiting—longer it waits, more it starts to feel forgotten.

In the middle, another really annoying situation can happen: you think the block is coming fast, but it’s actually only propagated to more nodes, and after a while it gets pushed back down again… Anyway, that night I just stared at the confirmation count until my eyes hurt, and in the end either I used fee replacement, or I just waited for it to expire.

Now everyone’s talking about modularization and DA layer as if it’s all they can think about, and developers are genuinely excited. But for users like me, I only care about one thing: when the network is congested, don’t make me sit at the tail end of the queue, serving as a human delay test.