When there’s congestion, your transaction enters the mempool—in other words, it’s queuing among a bunch of people waiting for an “auction.” Miners/sequencers pick the ones that can afford to pay first, and the rest just keep hanging there: it might slowly get pushed down, replaced (if you submit a higher fee rate to save yourself), or simply expire/get dropped. What’s even more annoying is that you think you’re in line, but in reality you’re competing with MEV bots for positioning—those guys cut in much more skillfully than you…

So should I just crank the fee all the way up from the start?
Not necessarily—since even if you max it out, your transaction might still get squeezed. It mainly depends on whether this particular order is truly urgent.

Recently, I’ve been seeing new L1/L2 projects offering incentives to pull in TVL, and I really understand the complaints about “mine, extract, sell”: once the network gets congested, the fees that old users pay can effectively turn into charitable donations… What I do now is that for non-urgent orders, I’d rather split them up and send them in off-peak times; for urgent ones, I’ll just pay more—at least I don’t pretend to be noble.