I just saw a transaction get stuck in the mempool for almost twenty minutes. Gas shot up to nearly three digits before it finally got included. Honestly, in moments like this, I end up watching the pending list instead—what the big players are抢ing, who’s canceling orders. It’s actually pretty interesting. On-chain congestion is like a mirror: it reflects everyone’s anxiety and calculations.

That NFT royalties argument recently was the same, too. Creators said they need to protect their income, while the secondary market claimed liquidity is the real lifeblood. The two sides kept bickering, but really they were both circling the same mempool queue logic: whoever is willing to pay more gas gets confirmed first. The rules are cold—there’s nothing moral about it.

Speaking of this, it reminded me of an account I used to follow that specializes in digging into whale addresses. It analyzed every day who was buying and who was selling, and it was kind of addictive to watch. Later, it started posting the same project’s “capital inflow signal” for three straight days, and I quietly unfollowed. It’s not that it was wrong—there was just that subtle feeling of an “observer suddenly becoming a promoter,” like an MEV bot suddenly appearing in the mempool. You know it’s working, but you don’t want to get too close to it.