Today I saw a transaction stuck in the mempool queue, and suddenly I felt this thing is quite like riding the subway during rush hour: submitting doesn’t mean you get on immediately, you just get a number. During congestion, nodes first collect a bunch of “candidates,” and miners/validators prefer to include transactions that pay more fees, so your transaction might stay pending for a long time, or even get pushed to expire/replace.

Especially recently, everyone is testing incentives on testnets, calculating points, and guessing whether the mainnet will issue tokens. With more on-chain activity, the queue immediately lengthens. Honestly, I only have two strategies now: either set the fee strategy in advance (don’t raise fees impulsively at the last minute), or just not compete, wait for the network to breathe, and then send it. Anyway, I don’t want to buy into emotional decisions.