Just saw a transaction get stuck in the mempool for nearly two hours—the fee was increased three times before it finally went through. Actually, every time the network is congested, the most direct feeling is this: you watch that pending status, like you’re waiting for a traffic light that never turns green. But what’s interesting is that at times like this, you can instead see more clearly what’s really happening on-chain—the high-priority transactions, the arbitrage bots, and even the operations from mixers are all scrambling to squeeze forward.

Recently, discussions about privacy coins and mixers have been heating up again. Some people think the lines of compliance are getting blurrier, while others think you should still use them when you need to. As for me, I feel that as on-chain data becomes more and more transparent, it actually pushes some teams to start using more covert ways to implement privacy contracts—such as using temporary address pools or layered routing. But honestly, these technical details matter less to me than the abnormal “unclaimed” transactions in the mempool—they often hint that a certain protocol is being tested quietly.

Anyway, let’s not go too far off-topic. Whenever I see congestion, I actually feel more at ease, because it means there are still people doing real work on-chain.