Just now, I got stuck on the confirmation page, staring at the spinning wheel. Then I remembered that when the network is congested, transactions are actually queued in the mempool. You click send, and it first gets “seen” by the node—then it waits with a bunch of similar transactions as miners/orderers pick it up. If you set the fee too stingily, it’s easy for the transaction to get stuck there, and even get pushed out by later transactions with higher fees. Even more annoying: you think it didn’t go through, so you send another one. In the end, the two transactions end up competing with each other, causing nonce conflicts in your wallet. Then you either speed it up or cancel it—either way, your mindset can easily collapse.

Recently, there’s been a lot of heated talk between L2s about TPS, fees, and subsidies, but the truth is that what you experience during congestion is simply “queue rules” and “who has priority.” If the process isn’t clear, even cheaper transactions are hard to use. For cross-chain transactions that require multiple rounds of confirmation, I’d rather go slower and make fewer attempts.