⏩ Speed up Bitcoin Transactions with Mempool Accelerator

Transaction confirmation time is a big problem in Bitcoin that the wider community does not understand well.

There are two main ways to get your transaction confirmed faster.

Replace by Fee (RBF)

Sometimes called "Fee Bump" in certain applications, RBF allows a user who sent a transaction to include a higher transaction fee.

For example, maybe you sent a Bitcoin transaction with a fee of 5 sats/byte, but the next block in the mempool is taking fees of 8 sats/byte, and the mempool shows you that 5 sats/byte will take weeks to confirm.

In this example, you could replace your 5 sats/byte fee with 8 sats/byte, and your transaction would be confirmed in the next block.

To use this, your transaction MUST be flagged as RBF-enabled (which, as of 2024, not all wallets support - even though they really should)

Child Pays for Parent

Child Pays for Parent (CPFP) allows a user to create a new "child" transaction that depends on an earlier unconfirmed "parent" transaction.

Assigning a higher fee to the child transaction gets both the child and parent transactions confirmed faster.

For example, you sent the same 5 sats/byte transaction, and the next block is taking 8 sats/byte.

You create a second transaction with 8 sats/byte from the wallet that you sent the original transaction to.

The 8 sats/byte transaction gets confirmed.

CPFP can be confusing unless you see it in action so I made a full tutorial here

Now we finally have a third option, that is more expensive but much simpler.

Mempool Accelerator

Mempool.space recently rolled out a new beta feature called "mempool accelerator".

This allows you to pay mempool.space to confirm your transaction faster.

It's like RBF but you don't have to enable anything - this will always work.

But why does it work?

Mempool Accelerator works by sending an out-of-band payment to mining pool partners.

This is not a change to your transaction on the Bitcoin network. In our example earlier, your transaction would still be stuck at 5 sats/byte.

This is effectively a bribe directly to miners to include your 5 sats/byte transaction in an earlier block, even though, based on your original fee, it doesn't make economic sense.

Miners have an economic incentive based on the fee on your transaction to process it faster by putting it into the block they mine.

But obviously, if you found the people who are mining the next block, you could bribe them in cash to include your transaction in that block.

In fancy bitcoin terms, we call this an "out-of-band" payment. Over on Ethereum they call it MEV (Miner Extractable Value / Maximal Extractable Value)

What's great about this is that even though it's more expensive than just running RBF, you can get absolutely any transaction confirmed - for a price.

If you want to learn more about Accelerator, you can check out Mempool's website here

Join the Discord or DM me on Twitter if you have any questions - I'll make some MEV on Bitcoin consequences videos in the future if there's enough interest.