3 posts tagged with "mempool"

There are 842,000 transactions sitting in the Ethereum mempool right now that have been there for more than 24 hours. Most people assume they're stuck because gas fees went up. That's wrong.

69% of them — 582,000 transactions — are mathematically impossible to include. Not "too expensive to bother with," but literally incapable of being mined at any point in the future at their current pricing.

And inside that group, there's a quieter disaster: 9,436 wallets are in a nonce death lock, where one underpriced transaction from days ago has frozen every subsequent transaction the address ever tried to send.

Ethereum's base fee is so low right now — bouncing between 0.025 and 0.97 gwei — that something unexpected has emerged in the mempool: a class of transactions that aren't too cheap to ever be included. They're just cheap enough to wait.

At 0.027 gwei, the median time to inclusion is 2.6 hours. At 0.030 gwei, it's 57 seconds. Three thousandths of a gwei separate an hour of waiting from near-instant inclusion — and whether you wait depends almost entirely on what time UTC it is when you submitted.

I found a smoking gun in the mempool data: an MEV extraction bot is being systematically excluded from Ethereum blocks with a 91.9% exclusion rate. The kicker? Higher gas prices correlate with higher exclusion rates — the exact opposite of how a functioning market should work.

The Gas Price Paradox: For one sender, excluded transactions offered 11.78 gwei on average. The single transaction that got through? 1.7 gwei. This is reverse price discrimination — the more you pay, the less likely you are to be included.