Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool Mempool introduced the Mempool Accelerator, a new off-chain service offering accelerated transaction approvals to Bitcoin network users. This service allows users to speed up the approval time for unconfirmed, queued transactions by paying an extra miner fee and service charge.
Partnership Established with 5 Mining Pools
Users can find their transactions on mempool.space and use the acceleration option to pay via the Bitcoin network or Lightning Network. Payments can also be made with fiat currencies. No registration is required for users during this process.
The initial partners of the service include mining pools such as Foundry USA Pool, MARA Pool, SBICrypto, SpiderPool, and Ocean Pool. These pools account for approximately 40% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate. Additionally, Bitcoin applications can integrate the Mempool Accelerator service via API.
Mempool communicates the acceleration request to these mining pools, which can prioritize and approve the transaction based on the accelerated fee rate. However, prioritization is not guaranteed.
To ensure transparency, acceleration offers will be publicly displayed in purple on Mempool’s block audit dashboard. Once submitted, acceleration requests cannot be altered, and some requests may be canceled to prevent abuse, aiming to avoid potential manipulations of the transaction queue.
Emerging as a Significant Alternative
Mempool Accelerator stands out as a significant alternative to existing on-chain methods. Traditional methods include replace-by-fee (RBF) and child-pays-for-parent (CPFP). In RBF, the sender of an unconfirmed transaction creates a new transaction with a higher fee. In CPFP, the recipient spends the unconfirmed transaction output, increasing the total fee. Both methods require a new transaction signature and specific wallet support.
Mempool Accelerator offers a method that does not require a new on-chain transaction, providing an alternative that does not rely on a centralized third party’s trustworthiness. However, the service fee is significantly higher than average transaction fees, which is considered its main disadvantage. Nonetheless, the service is deemed highly suitable for high-priority transactions. During testing, the transaction time was observed to be reduced to as short as 9 minutes.
