The Mempool team has launched an off-chain service to accelerate bitcoin transactions outside the blockchain through mining pool partners. The service will be useful in the context of a sharp change in commissions.
Mempool Accelerator™ fixes this
Launch of open beta starts today!
Click Accelerate from the transaction page and pay with lightning or fiat.
No sign up necessary.
Initial mining pool partners make up 40% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate: @FoundryServices, @MarathonDH, @SBICrypto,… pic.twitter.com/NIQXq53ZRb
The platform cooperates with Foundry USA Pool, MARA Pool, SBICrypto, SpiderPool and Ocean Pool. They account for ~40% of the hashrate, according to the organization.
For confirmation of "stuck" transfers, Mempool Accelerator users will have to pay an additional fee for mining and maintenance
The process looks like this:
search for a transaction on mempool.space;choosing an option to accelerate it;payment with Bitcoin via Lightning Network (LN) or fiat via Cash App, Apple Pay or Google Pay without registration.Mempool sends a request to partners who can decide on acceleration based on the new commission rate.
The transaction is not replaced – pools consider it with high priority. This increases the chances of its validation in the next block, although this is not guaranteed.
"Your transaction will be a priority for 43.4% of miners. This will reduce the expected waiting time before the first confirmation to ~9 minutes," the project's website says.
Bitcoin applications can integrate Mempool Accelerator through its API.
To increase transparency, the acceleration of applications is displayed in the audit panel of Mempool blocks, highlighted in purple.
As part of our mission to improve transparency, the block audit feature has been updated to incorporate acceleration bid boosts (the numbers in purple). pic.twitter.com/YGdPiBmRCz
— mempool (@mempool) July 27, 2024After sending the request, they cannot be changed, and some may mark with no refund to ensure that the service is not used for "pinning transactions or other types of abuse." In this way, the team intends to prevent unfair advantage at the expense of other users.
Mempool Accelerator offers an alternative to existing on-chain methods to increase the chances of miners to enable translation: replace-by-fee (RBF) and child-pays-for-parent (CPFP).
In RBF, the sender of an unconfirmed transaction creates a new one with a higher fee, spending some of the UTXO inputs often accepted on top of the original transaction.
However, a new transaction must be signed, the sender's wallet must support RBF, and the identifier will also change.
In CPFP, the recipient spends his unconfirmed withdrawal, increasing the effective commission of the original transaction, since the miner cannot include a new transaction without processing the original one.
In this case, it is also necessary to sign a new transfer, the sender's wallet must support CPFP, and restrictions mean that this is not possible for some transactions.
As an alternative, Mempool Accelerator relies on off–chain payment. In this case, there is no need to sign a new transaction.
The main drawback is that in this case, users rely on a centralized third party rather than the network of the first cryptocurrency.
In addition, the service fee is significantly higher than the average commission — about 100 times compared to its current level of $0.39, according to The Block. In other words, the service is only suitable for higher priority transactions.
According to the Mempool team, users should always apply RBF or CPFP if possible.
Mempool Accelerator is useful in the following scenarios:
limited wallet options for transactions;difficulties with multisig;opening and closing of LN channels;saving the same transaction ID.Recall that in October 2023, co-founder and CTO of Casa Jameson Lopp called on developers to more actively experiment with the first cryptocurrency to expand and improve its ecosystem.
In particular, the specialist noted solutions that appeared relatively recently — blockchain, Spiderchain and BitVM. In his opinion, they allow you to "unload" the mempool and expand the possibilities of smart contracts on bitcoin.