We are on a bullrun (and we're not done yet) and many traders/investors are moving their funds in and out of exchanges more often which causes the network to clog. There are other factors like the mining difficulty adjustments but that's not the topic I want to address.
As we all know, a congested Bitcoin blockchain leads to high transaction fees like $5 or more. What can you do to avoid paying such fees?
Here are some of the newbie friendly tricks that I use:
1. Use non-custodial wallets instead of custodial wallets.
- Non-custodial wallets allows you to set your desired fees (Electrum, Coinomi, Trust wallet, etc.)
- Custodial wallets will give you a limited option and their recommended fees are usually higher than what is required (i.e Coinbase).
2. Check mempool size and recommended fees on websites like
https://mempool.space/ (noob friendly) and
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ Both sites are pretty much accurate from my experience.
3. Send on a weekend. It's been observed that mempool tends to be less congested around these times as traders needs some "rest" too. You can send for as low as 1 sats/vbyte (less than $0.50) and your transaction will confirm in an hour (more or less).