Last night was also another “coffee to stay alive,” staring at the mempool and watching the queue. It’s really just like squeezing onto the subway during the morning rush: you hit send, and all you’re really handing in is “I want to get on the train”—it’s the miners/packagers who decide who goes first. When it starts backing up, if you set the gas too low, it keeps getting stuck; on-chain it shows as unconfirmed. The more you refresh, the more anxious you get, and you even start to doubt whether you clicked the wrong address… Actually, in many cases you’re just getting cut in line. Someone else bumps the fee, and MEV robots do their thing, and your order just ends up at the back.

What’s even more annoying is the kind of “I just want to cancel an order / top up some collateral,” but after waiting in line for half a day, the price has already run, and over on perpetuals, a small slippage can completely detonate your mindset. Recently, new L1/L2s have been rolling out incentives to boost TVL—when more people are mining, selling, and arbitraging, the chain gets even more clogged, and users’ complaints from the old days aren’t without reason. Anyway, whenever I run into congestion now, I first make it clear: is this transaction urgent or not? If it’s not urgent, don’t force it. Otherwise, you think you’re trading, but really you’re just fighting with the queue. That’s it for now.