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Blockchain explorer Mempool has launched an off-chain service that allows users to expedite unconfirmed transactions by paying additional mining fees and service fees.
The service, known as Mempool Accelerator, will “verify stalled transactions by paying an out-of-band fee,” the project states. Users can find a transaction on mempool.space, select the acceleration option on the transaction page, and pay with Bitcoin via Lightning, or with fiat currency via Cash App, Apple Pay, or Google Pay without any registration process.
The initial partners for the service are five: Foundry USA Pool, MARA Pool, SBICrypto, SpiderPool, and Ocean Pool, which together account for approximately 40% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate, according to the company.
Mempool sends an acceleration request to the mining pool partner, who can then expedite the transaction based on the new acceleration fee rate. The transaction is not replaced. It simply increases the likelihood of confirmation in the next block by processing it with a higher fee in that mining pool, but this is not guaranteed. Bitcoin applications can also integrate the Mempool Accelerator service via the API.
To increase transparency, acceleration bid boosts are publicly visible on Mempool’s block audit dashboard, highlighted in purple. However, accelerations cannot be modified after they are submitted, and some requests may be canceled without a refund. This is to ensure that the service is not used for “transaction fixing or other types of abuse” that seek to manipulate the order of transactions in a block to gain an unfair advantage at the expense of other users.
Accelerator is an alternative to existing on-chain methods.
Mempool’s acceleration service provides alternatives to existing on-chain methods to increase the likelihood that miners will include a transaction, including Replace with Fee (RBF) and Child-Parent Payments (CPFP).
With RBF, the sender of an unconfirmed transaction often creates a new, higher-fee transaction using some of the same inputs accepted in the original transaction. However, the new transaction must be signed, the sender’s wallet must support RBF, and the transaction ID must change.
With CPFP, the recipient of an unconfirmed transaction uses the unconfirmed transaction output to increase the real fee of the original transaction, because miners cannot include the new transaction without processing the original transaction. However, the new transaction must be signed, the sender’s wallet must support CPFP, and some transactions are not possible due to limitations.
Alternatively, Mempool Accelerator uses out-of-band payments rather than new on-chain Bitcoin transactions that require signatures. The main disadvantage is that users are reliant on a centralized third party rather than the untrusted peer-to-peer Bitcoin network.
The service fee is significantly higher than the average transaction fee. According to The Block, it is currently around 100 times the average $0.39 fee, which means it is likely only suitable for higher priority transactions. “Your transaction will be prioritized by up to 43.4% of miners. This reduces the expected waiting time for first confirmation to around 9 minutes,” the service test noted.
Mempool states that users should always use RBF or CPFP if possible, but acceleration services are useful in scenarios where the user’s transaction requires limited wallet functionality, complex multi-signatures, opening and closing Lightning channels, or maintaining the same transaction ID.
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