Kleros the decentralised jury system which I had written about before, recently annouced a move to the Ethereum sidechain, xDAI. Seeing as I'm already present on xDAI due to the privacy project HOPR, I figured that I may as well migrate my stake in the Kleros courts off the Ethereum Mainnet and onto the cheaper, faster and less congested network.

That meant that I would need to do a number of Ethereum mainnet transactions... one transaction to unstake from each of the courts that I was staked to, then a spending approval for the Omnibridge contract to move from Ethereum to xDAI and then FINALLY, the actual bridging of tokens to the xDAI chain.

I was happily progressing through the transactions as ETH gas prices were pretty stable and low at the time. These were low priority transactions, so I didn't need to bid high for speed. So, I was getting by with 14 gwei or thereabouts... and just walking away and coming back an hour later to check if the transactions had gone through.

However, when the time came for the last bridging transaction to occur... I had put in the same bid price, and then walked away. An hour or two later... it still hadn't gone through. There was just a little temporary spike in transaction fees, so my 14 gwei wasn't competitive against the rough average of around 25. No problem, again... it wasn't a time sensitive transaction, so I could afford to just wait it out. After all, the usual thing that happens when you resend a transaction with a high gas fee is... the network will suddenly drop the fees lower! I'm really looking forward to London where the swings aren't quite so unpredictable!

However, the next day... a quick check on Etherscan showed that the transaction was still pending...

... it turns out some random million(billion?)-aires had decided to launch some stupid Stoner Cats NFT TV thing on the Ethereum mainnet, and fees had spiked like crazy. I was seeing some people sharing screenshots of 999 gwei on Twitter! Okay, no way I'm competing against that.

So, I decided to look into a bit more... Well, Stoner Cats isn't my thing, although I have to say I sort liked CryptoKitties, and I can't complain about where that rabbit (cat) hole took me. But if you ask me, Stoner Cats seems more like a celebrity cash-in.

The concept behind it sounds decent, in that you purchase the NFT to be able to view the cartoons... could be an interesting way to reward creators and artists and create a secondary market as well. Anyway, but at that moment, I was just a bit put out that my transaction was still sitting in the mempool...

So, here is my little lonely transaction... waiting for the opportunity to be included into a block... any block, so that the worried smart contract on Omnichain will be able to stop looking and waiting for its arrival. It is like a love story gone wrong... two star crossed lovers... never to meet (well, hopefully, more like delayed!).

I will give it until the weekend, generally the gas prices dip over the small hours of the weekend... but there is also this Axie Ronin Bridge that is also pushing prices up...

Luckily it isn't a time critical transaction, so I can afford to wait... on the other hand, I hope I don't need to use that particular wallet any time soon!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.