Just saw the gas spike to 50+; the mempool queue is lined up longer than my delivery order 😅. When you send a transaction, the first step isn’t getting it on-chain—it’s fighting it out in the mempool with a bunch of other transactions. Nodes sort by gas price: the higher one gets packaged first, while the lower one just sits there waiting. And if the network suddenly gets congested, it might get dropped directly. Anyway, last week my swap got stuck for nearly two hours; I finally got it through by increasing the fee and re-sending, and it really hurt the fees.

Those testnet points tasks have the same issue too. A lot of people only did them because they were chasing whether the mainnet might distribute tokens, and it ended up with a clogged mempool—gas burned for nothing. To put it plainly, the nature of transaction queueing is “the highest bidder wins,” same as real life when you’re fighting for a parking spot.

Last line: What I’m most afraid of missing out on isn’t actually the opportunity—it’s paying the gas already, but having the transaction rejected.