What is chain congestion?
When blockchain networks such as Arbitrum or Base become busy, they can experience periods of chain congestion. This can lead to higher transaction fees, transaction failures, or long confirmation times. Gains is designed to operate efficiently, but network congestion is outside the app’s control.- Gas fees rise as users compete to get their transactions included.
- Transactions may be delayed, reverted or not included at all if gas fees are too low.
- User experience degrades, especially during periods of extremely high network activity.
Network-wide gas comparisons are also available on ultrasound.money (Ethereum L1) and via chainlist.org for RPC health.
How to manage chain congestion
- Monitor network conditions: when Gains detects unusual congestion or high gas prices on the underlying chain, it displays alerts, banners, tooltips, and notices. At high congestion, a red mark sits on the network button, the trading panel warns you above the trade button, the footer reads Network highly congested, and on the trading page a red banner runs under the navigation bar (you can close it for 24 hours). At a lower level, the footer reads Network congested and the marks turn yellow, with no banner.
High congestion: the banner on the trading page. Example state.
The mark on the network button, hovered.
The warning in the trading panel.
- Adjust gas settings: the gas button at the right end of the footer opens this option (it reads Fast by default). Consider changing to
Aggressive, but pay attention to the higher estimated transaction cost: hover the gas price figure next to the button to see what a trade costs in gas.
The gas options, opened from the footer.
The estimated gas cost of a trade.
- Change your RPC endpoint: an RPC is the gateway between your wallet and the blockchain. Default RPCs can become slow or unresponsive during congestion. chainlist.org lists alternatives and can help add them to your wallet.