Mempool Launches Accelerator for Bitcoin Transactions

Mempool.space, an open-source bitcoin ecosystem explorer, has launched an accelerator service to expedite transactions using off-chain payment methods and partnerships with major mining pools.

On Saturday, Mempool announced the beta opening of the Mempool Accelerator, which supports payments via Lightning Network or fiat. This service comes in anticipation of bitcoin’s dynamic fee market and block space activities, which now account for a larger portion of mining rewards following the fourth bitcoin halving.

With the Mempool Accelerator, bitcoin senders and receivers can request Mempool to accelerate their unconfirmed transactions by paying a new miner fee and a service charge to ensure that Mempool’s pool partners prioritize their transactions.

The Mempool project team noted that the initial mining pool partners, including Foundry USA Pool, MARA Pool, SBICrypto, SpiderPool, and Ocean Pool, comprise 40% of bitcoin’s total hashrate.

While existing fee bumping methods like Replace By Fee (RBF) and Child Pays for Parent (CPFP) use an on-chain mechanism, they require support from bitcoin wallets to enable these features for users.

In contrast, Mempool’s out-of-band offer takes the fee-bumping step off-chain. However, it relies on a centralized third party instead of the trustless peer-to-peer network, as described by Mempool. For transparency, Mempool said it has updated its block audit feature to show acceleration bids in purple on its live mempool dashboard.