Etherscan's pending-transactions count has been in the 60k-80k range for a few days. Why is this?

If I look at etherscan's current pending-transactions list, sorted by gas price, I see transaction 0xb3fc7559712e7f95919b6faea, which has a gas price of 2,311.44 GWei, and a 21-minute-old timestamp. Why is this juicy transaction not being picked up by miners? If it's an invalid transaction, somehow, why is it sticking around in the pending transactions list? Does a node's mempool tend to carry tens of thounsands of transactions like this?

  • 1
    At this moment nobody will be able to mine that transaction because it uses more ether than available in the sender account.
    – Ismael
    Mar 19 '20 at 22:33
  • Ah, thanks. That makes sense. Mar 20 '20 at 19:54

60k - 80k pending transactions sounds like a normal situation and does not seem extensive.

Currently, Ethereum does ~750k transactions daily. Assuming all transactions are processed at the same rate, the content of the pool is swapped in every 2.5 hours. However, my guess is that automated services send very low fee transactions that are not critical. Furthermore, some transactions might be deprioritised by miners, e.g. if they result to revert, but I do not have insight into this.

And some transactions might be just unlucky and not picked up by miners.

Your Answer

