There’s actually no such factor as “congestion” in Bitcoin. Reasonably, Bitcoin has a restrict on what number of transactions it might probably course of, which is 1 block (1 MvB/4 MWU, round 2000-4000 transactions) per 10 minutes. Miners usually choose transactions paying the very best feerate to incorporate within the subsequent block, which suggests a transaction will get included solely when it is within the top-paying 1 MvB of unconfirmed transactions. When there are lots of high-feerate transactions ready to be confirmed, a transaction paying a low feerate can wait doubtlessly weeks or months (theoretically without end) to get confirmed.

If a service pauses payouts due to “congestion”, it merely means they do not need to pay the excessive charges to get their transactions confirmed and like to attend for charges to go down.

You’ll be able to examine mempool.area for present charges. The minimal feerate to get right into a block has been above 50 sat/vB for just a few weeks, which is kind of uncommon.