BITCOIN MEMPOOL
82,852 PAYMENTS ARE WAITING RIGHT NOW
A payment does not go straight into the record. It waits in a room first, alongside every other payment the world has just sent. Every ten minutes a miner takes one block's worth out, and the rest keep waiting.
- PAYMENTS WAITING
- 82,852
- SPACE THEY TAKE UP
- 41.6 MB
- BLOCKS TO CLEAR IT
- 42
- PRICE TO MAKE THE NEXT BLOCK
- 0.3 sat/vB
- CHEAPEST IN THE ROOM
- 0.0 sat/vB
- BLOCK RIGHT NOW
- 965,970
WHAT THE MEMPOOL IS
Send a payment and it goes out to every computer on the network within seconds. They all check it. If it follows the rules, they hold on to it.
That pile of checked but not yet settled payments is the mempool. Every computer keeps its own copy, so there is no single official queue. They mostly agree.
Nothing in there has happened yet. The payment is real, signed and public, but it is not in the record until a miner puts it in a block.
WHY YOUR PAYMENT IS WAITING
A block has a fixed amount of room. About one megabyte. That was set on purpose, so that keeping a full copy of the whole history stays cheap enough for an ordinary person to do it.
Right now there are 41.6 megabytes waiting for a one megabyte block. That is about 42 blocks worth, or roughly 6.9 hours if nothing new arrived. Something new always arrives.
So not everybody gets in. Somebody has to be left for the next block, and the way the network picks is price.
WHAT DECIDES WHO GOES FIRST
You attach a fee. The miner building the next block takes the payments paying the most, because the fees are theirs to keep.
Here is the part that surprises people. You do not pay for the amount you send. You pay for the space your payment takes up. Sending a fortune can cost less than sending pocket change, because what counts is how many bytes the payment is, not how many coins are in it.
Right now the cheapest payment getting into the next block is paying about 0.3 sat per byte. Below that, you wait.
QUESTIONS
Why is my Bitcoin transaction still pending?
Because the fee on it is below what the next blocks are taking. There are 82,852 payments waiting and each block only has room for about one megabyte. Yours sits there until the queue clears or the price comes down to meet it.
What Bitcoin fee do I need right now?
About 0.3 sat per byte to make the next block. Nothing in the waiting room is cheaper than 0.0 sat per byte.
How long will a pending Bitcoin transaction take?
Nobody can promise a time. There are about 42 blocks worth of payments waiting, which is roughly 6.9 hours at ten minutes a block. New payments keep arriving and fees keep moving.
Does sending more bitcoin cost a bigger fee?
No. You pay for the size of the payment in bytes, not for the amount inside it. A payment moving a thousand coins can cost less than one moving twenty.
Can I cancel a pending Bitcoin transaction?
Not directly. It is already public. Some wallets can replace it with a version paying a higher fee, which the network accepts instead. Whether yours can do that depends on how the payment was sent.
Can a transaction be dropped from the mempool?
Yes. Computers hold the waiting room in memory and clear out the cheapest entries when it fills up. A payment nobody picks up can quietly disappear and has to be sent again.
SEE IT RUNNING
The mempool is one of the nine parts of the machine on this site: a queue you can watch, sorted by price, filling up and emptying with every block.
THE PARTS NEXT TO IT
- MININGThe race that empties the waiting room every ten minutes.
- BLOCKCHAINWhere a payment goes once it leaves the queue, and why it cannot come back.
- WALLETWhat signs a payment before it ever reaches the queue.
SMALL PRINT
This page describes a public network. It is not financial advice and recommends no wallet, exchange or fee setting. Fee figures come from public Bitcoin APIs, they move minute to minute, and they may be a few minutes old.