Network Congestion
Blockchain saturation slowing down or making transactions more expensive.
Beginner-friendly explanation
Network congestion happens when too many people use a blockchain at the same time. Transactions then become slower or more expensive.
📌 Example:
During heavy NFT sales, the Ethereum network can become congested, and users must pay higher fees to prioritize transactions.
Intermediate-level insight
Congestion results from the blockchain's limited transactions per second (TPS) capacity. Users raise their gas price to get their transactions validated faster.
📌 Example:
During a highly anticipated NFT drop, gas wars lead to massive congestion on Ethereum.
Advanced perspective
Congestion affects economic models (higher costs, lost opportunities) and drives the development of scalability solutions (Layer 2, sharding, rollups). It can also lead to inter-chain arbitrage when users temporarily migrate to less congested blockchains.
📌 Example:
During heavy Ethereum congestion, many users switch to Polygon or Arbitrum to keep using DeFi with lower costs.
Blockchain & Technology
congestion, blockchain saturation, gas wars, TPS, high fees, network slowdown, Layer 2, scalability, arbitrage, inter-chain migration