Recently, people keep asking me: why does on-chain data always "pause" for a moment, with the balance/transaction record opening with a spinning circle before popping up?

Honestly, it's not often network congestion, but your indexer/Subgraph is catching up on blocks and recalculating, and RPC is also limiting your flow, so when it's crowded, you get queued;
Plus, some front-ends reuse public nodes to save costs, which makes the experience very dependent on luck.
(Don't blame your poor internet, it's not entirely your fault.)

Lately, hardware wallets have been out of stock, phishing links are rampant, and everyone's security awareness has suddenly skyrocketed. I can understand that, but don’t rush to click on unfamiliar links like "accelerators/backup nodes"...
My approach is: I prefer to be a bit slower, switch to trusted RPCs, and carefully check the domain name—being a few seconds late with data is better than losing assets.
That’s all for now.