[thedancollins]

And the reason for the spikes - blockchain technology struggles to handle large transaction volumes. The consensus mechanism monitors block creation time and tries to keep it at 10 minutes. Ideally, there are never more than a block's worth of transactions to be created at any given time. When that is not the case a backup occurs and yes, the settling takes far too long. This is the technical challenge that must be overcome before a PoW backed blockchain should be considered "viable" ready-for-prime-time. It is a significant engineering problem that I am excited to try to solve.