Lately, I've been noticing that on-chain data keeps "hanging," and it's not my internet connection. Mostly, it's the indexer/Subgraph/RPC taking turns to slack off behind the scenes... To put it simply, what you're seeing isn't the real-time chain, but a "cache" that's been organized for you by someone else. The Subgraph is still syncing, and the index queue is clogged, so the frontend just seems to freeze; on the RPC side, it's even more direct—when rate limiting kicks in, it just throws a timeout at you, and after retrying a few times, it suddenly works again, just like someone squeezing your neck to let the air out.

Airdrop season makes this even more obvious. Everyone's doing tasks, checking points, and the anti-witch hunt makes the degens feel like clocking in at work, with interfaces being hammered so hard they smoke. A couple of days ago, I even followed a "real-time leaderboard," which looked pretty cool, but once the peak hit, it delayed so much I started doubting everything... My suspicion got the better of me, so I unfollowed it, preferring to run a small experiment myself to compare data from different RPCs / different sources. Anyway, don’t be too superstitious about a single data source—those hiccups might not be your mistake; they might really be struggling to breathe.