When mempool gets congested, your transaction is basically squeezing in and out of the line. Broadcast it first, and as nodes receive them, they start “picky” about what to include: the one with the higher fee gets served first, and if you offer too little, you get kept on hold. By the time it’s actually packaged, the price for those few routing hops is no longer what you saw when you clicked confirm. Set slippage too low and it will directly revert; set it too high and you’ll be waiting to be targeted by a sandwich attack—the more urgent you are, the more likely you’ll end up as someone else’s lunch.

Lately, everyone’s been talking about staking unlocks and the token unlock calendar, afraid that once things unlock, the tokens will come crashing down. To put it simply, these periods are when the network gets most clogged. Once on-chain sentiment runs hot, the mempool is just like the morning rush hour: people behind you shove you forward, and you think you’re “escaping in time.” I have one habit: first check whether the pending pile is big. If it’s really congested, I split my transactions into batches and avoid the popular pools. I’d rather be slower than pay “fuel money” to MEV dogs.