Every time the blockchain gets congested, I’m reminded of governance meetings where people line up to speak: the mempool is that long queue right at the entrance. Your transaction sits there waiting, watching to see who’s leaving a more respectable tip (gas), and miners/packagers end up grabbing whoever pays first. That’s how you get situations like: the same amount of money, slowly waiting, getting squeezed out, or even stuck until you yourself forget it’s still pending… And sometimes other people “cut in line” and take a quick bite, and your mindset instantly shifts from calm to “what am I even doing?”

Lately, everyone’s been chatting about modularization and the DA layer—developers are like they’ve thrown an afterparty, while users (including me) are completely baffled. In any case, when things clog up, you still have to return to the old plot: “queue up + bid higher + pray.” That’s it for now.