Expensive Fees and Network Congestion
In periods of elevated traffic on the Bitcoin network, lots of people try to get their transaction confirmed quickly. As this condition intensifies the fees to get your transactions included in the Bitcoin blockchain get more and more expensive.
Tip: You can optimize on your fees spending. Simply select custom fees and enter a feerate expressed in sat/vb, you can find optimal values on websites like mempool.space or whatthefee.io.
Transaction Confirmation Time
It is normal for bitcoin transactions to be delayed from time to time, especially when the network is experiencing high traffic or a transaction has been sent with low fees.
Bitcoin transactions are considered confirmed when a bitcoin miner includes your transaction in a block. There is only a certain amount of space in each block, so it will take a longer time for your transaction to be confirmed when it is competing with others to be added.
Even paying higher fees cannot guarantee a fast confirmation time, but it will improve the odds of your transaction being confirmed sooner.
Note: Because bitcoin miners determine when your transaction is confirmed, Blockstream does not have the ability to speed up your confirmation time. To learn more about bitcoin transaction fees, visit our guide here.
Not to worry, your transaction will be confirmed as soon as network traffic dies down a bit. In the meantime, you may view this site for a visual representation of traffic and current fees on the network. Also, Blockstream Green users may choose to increase their transaction fee if they would like to try to have their transaction confirmed sooner.