I’m just a small nobody who trades options, but every time the chain gets congested, I want to roll my eyes: the moment you click confirm, the transaction isn’t really “going through” yet—it’s just queued up in the mempool, scrambling with a bunch of others for “who gets on first.” If you set the Gas too low, it’s like grabbing a standing-only ticket and trying to squeeze onto a high-speed train—miners/packagers don’t even bother looking at you. If you set it too high, it’s not reliably safe either: you could get trapped behind a pile of even more urgent transactions, slowly waiting forever, and you might even get bumped off or end up stuck. In the end, you think it’s been executed, but really it’s just been “pending” for a long time.

Lately, it’s not like there haven’t been a whole bunch of testnet incentives and expected points—everyone rushes to the chain to complete tasks… and then starts guessing whether the mainnet will issue tokens. To put it plainly, when it’s congested, it’s the easiest time to break people’s mindset: chasing confirmations, repeatedly speeding up, and the fee just keeps going higher and higher until you get overwhelmed. My approach is pretty boring: I’d rather be late, move less, or split your order into smaller ones to test the waters—don’t let your emotions wipe out your position management.