🎁 Exclusive offer: Get EXTRA Bits and Celebrate Bybit's 6th Birthday With $2.2M Prize Pool. Act now!
Crypto Terms:  Letter M
Jul 07, 2023 |
updated: Apr 02, 2024

What is Mempool?

Mempool Meaning:
Mempool - a mechanism for network nodes to store the information about all unconfirmed transactions.
easy
2 minutes

Let's find out Mempool meaning, definition in crypto, what is Mempool, and all other detailed facts.

A mempool is a mechanism that network nodes use to store information on all unconfirmed transactions. It is the storage area for transactions that are yet to be added to a block.

If the nodes wish to submit a transaction to the miners, they must first relay it throughout the network. The mempool is then used to temporarily store all pending transactions. By looking at the mempool, a node can decide whether the information on a new transaction will be relayed or not.

The number of mempools is equal to that of the network nodes. Not all nodes receive the same transaction information simultaneously, and some nodes may store more information than others. Throughout the network, the nodes have different capabilities of temporary transaction storage due to hardware differences.

As a result of these differences, all nodes maintain their own renditions of pending transactions. This leads to a variety of mempool sizes as well as the number of unconfirmed transactions logged on different sources.

When a new valid block is sent to a node, the mempool is cleared of all transactions that match the ones logged in the block, as well as transactions with mismatched inputs. This can significantly reduce the mempool size.

Users running a network node have no financial incentives and may have issues finding dedicated hardware. The mempool can often reach the RAM limit, which leads to the node crashing and restarting with a cleared mempool in the older Bitcoin (BTC) versions.

In updated versions, if the mempool size is close to reaching the RAM capacity, the node starts the process of a minimal fee threshold. Transactions with fees per kB below the threshold are automatically removed from the mempool. Only new transactions that meet the fee per kB threshold are stored.