Got schooled by the mempool again today… When it’s congested and you hit “Confirm,” what you’re really doing is sliding your transaction into an invisible line to get a number. Miners/validators first pick the ones with the “bigger food-money” (i.e., higher fees) to bundle and include. If your fee is too low, your transaction will keep getting stuck, with a status like “sent but nothing happened.” If you’re getting anxious, all you can do is add a fee to replace it (fee bumping / replace-by-fee), or wait for it to expire and cool off on its own.

Plainly put, it’s not that the chain is broken—it’s that everyone’s fighting over the same packing window. It also made me think of how lately people keep using RWA and US Treasury yield to compare with on-chain yield products. It sounds pretty steady, but when on-chain congestion hits and fees go through the roof, the friction cost of entering and exiting can grind away a good chunk of that “yield”… For someone like me, a socially anxious patchwork person, I can only quietly nudge the gas up a little, and tell myself: Please don’t mess with me.