Newbie starter pack: What to do during Bitcoin spikes

As the cryptomarket is responding to the OPEC deal failure, the network congestion is going up. Generally, it doesn’t matter whether the market is up or down — the number of transactions in the blockchain network will inevitably surge.

High mempool load can result in your transaction being stuck for hours. Here’s some simple advice on how to avoid it.

First of all, check the mempool size. For example, here. Hover over the graph (as shown on the screenshot) to see the load. If the load is up to 2–3M bytes, there’s nothing to worry about: your transaction should go through within minutes, no additional action is required.

If this figure significantly exceeds the normal load (which is the case now), you may want to set a higher fee for the miners to process your transaction faster. What is more, if you see the graph rising, the upward trend is likely to go on.

It’s up to you to choose whether to speed up the transaction or monitor the mempool till it calms down, though. If you opt for the first, you can make use of the adjustable fees in OWNR Wallet: just toggle the button to ‘High’ as shown below. That’s all!

Adjustable fees in OWNR Wallet