ViaBTC free accelerator in 2026: does it still work?

ViaBTC is the name most people find first when a payment will not confirm. It is a real mining pool, it has run a free accelerator for years, and the page still says free in large letters. So the obvious question is fair: if you paste your transaction ID there today, does anything happen?

We went through the rules printed on ViaBTC's own accelerator page, set them against the live state of the Bitcoin network, and measured how often ViaBTC actually finds a block. The answer is more specific than yes or no, and it is the same answer for almost everyone who is stuck right now.

What ViaBTC's free accelerator actually requires

The rules are printed plainly on ViaBTC's accelerator page, in the section that explains why a free submission fails. We copied them on 26 September 2026. There are five, and every one of them matters.

If your transaction passes all five, ViaBTC says it will be prioritized for inclusion in the next block ViaBTC mines. That last clause is important and we come back to it below. It is not the next block. It is the next block that ViaBTC happens to find.

Converting the fee rule into the numbers your wallet shows

0.0001 BTC is 10,000 satoshis. Per kB means per 1,000 bytes of transaction. So the floor is 10 satoshis for every byte, and on a normal wallet screen that reads as roughly 10 sat/vB. ViaBTC writes the rule in bytes rather than virtual bytes, so a SegWit transaction may need a little more than 10 sat/vB to clear it, never less.

A normal payment with one input and two outputs is around 141 vB. At 10 sat/vB that payment carries a fee of about 1,410 satoshis. Keep that number in mind, because it tells you what kind of transaction is allowed through the free door.

The problem: that fee floor is higher than the whole market

Here is the part the accelerator page cannot tell you, because it depends on the day. We checked the mempool on 26 September 2026, the same day we read the rules.

Read the last row twice. Not one waiting transaction paid enough to use ViaBTC's free tier. The richest transaction in the queue paid less than half of the floor.

Now turn it around. A transaction that does pay 10 sat/vB is paying about 24 times what the next block needs. It does not need any help. It will be in the next block whoever mines it, ViaBTC or not, usually within about ten minutes.

This is not a trick by ViaBTC. The floor was set years ago, when blocks were full and 10 sats per byte was a modest fee. The market moved underneath it. You can see how far it moved in our guide to why the mempool looks full while fees stay low. The daily figures behind that guide currently show the top paying transaction at 4.57 sat/vB and the next block clearing at 0.37 sat/vB.

How often ViaBTC actually finds a block

Suppose fees spike again and your transaction does clear the floor. Your submission is accepted. What happens next depends entirely on how often ViaBTC mines a block, because only ViaBTC's own blocks will carry the priority.

We pulled the pool statistics for the most recent month from mempool.space. Out of 4,545 blocks, ViaBTC found 394. That is 8.67 percent of all blocks, fourth among pools.

Each block is an independent draw, so the chance that ViaBTC has found at least one block after a given number of blocks is simple to work out. Blocks arrive about every ten minutes on average.

The average wait is about 11.5 blocks, a little under two hours. There is roughly a one in nine chance you are still waiting after four hours. None of this is bad luck. It is what 8.67 percent of hashrate means.

How that compares with the big paid accelerator

The largest paid accelerator does not work through one pool. It works through a group of partner pools, and when we checked the blocks those partners found, they covered 81.9 percent of the network. ViaBTC competes with that group and is not part of it. A transaction pushed through a service covering about four fifths of hashrate usually lands within a block or two. A transaction pushed through one pool with under a tenth waits for that one pool. We compare the services in detail in which Bitcoin accelerators still work.

What about ViaBTC's paid acceleration?

The paid service removes the fee floor and the size limit. You sign in, paste the transaction ID, see an estimated fee, and pay from a balance held in your ViaBTC account in BTC, BCH or LTC. ViaBTC then prioritizes the transaction in its own blocks.

Three things are worth knowing before you pay.

• It is still one pool. Paying does not change the table above. You are buying priority in blocks ViaBTC finds, which is about one block in eleven.
• It cannot be cancelled or refunded. ViaBTC's page states that an acceleration cannot be cancelled once submitted, and the service is non refundable. If you bump the fee yourself an hour later, the money is gone.
• You need an account with funds in it first. The fee comes out of your ViaBTC balance. For someone whose coins are the thing that is stuck, that is often the hardest step.

We could not publish a sample price, because ViaBTC only shows an estimate after you sign in and paste a live transaction, and we will not print a number we did not see. What we can say is that any quote should be compared with what the fix costs if you do it yourself, which is the next section.

What to do instead, and what it costs

If your transaction is below the next block rate, the fix is to raise its fee. You can do that yourself, it takes a minute, and at 2026 rates it costs almost nothing.

2 sat/vB is roughly five times the rate the next block needed on the day we measured, which is a generous margin. Dollar figures use a Bitcoin price of $84,017. Step by step instructions for each wallet are in how to bump a fee with RBF and how to use CPFP.

If you cannot change the fee at all

Sometimes neither method is open to you. The classic case is a withdrawal from an exchange: the exchange signed the transaction, so you cannot replace it, and until it appears in your wallet you cannot spend its output. That is the one situation where paid pool acceleration makes real sense, and we cover it in stuck exchange withdrawals.

When ViaBTC's free tier is genuinely useful

It would be unfair to call the free tier useless in every market. It was built for a busy network, and in a busy network it helps.

Picture a fee spike where the next block needs 40 sat/vB and your transaction pays 12. You are stuck, you are above ViaBTC's floor, and your transaction is small. A free submission then gives you priority in roughly one block in eleven, which can turn a wait of days into a wait of hours. Bitcoin went through spikes like that in 2023 and 2024.

So the rule of thumb is simple. If the next block is clearing well above 10 sat/vB, the free tier is worth a try. If the next block is clearing below 10 sat/vB, as it has for most of 2026, the free tier cannot help you and a fee bump will.

Common reasons a ViaBTC free submission fails

1. Fee too low. By far the most common in 2026, for the reasons above. The fix is not to try again next hour. The fix is RBF or CPFP.
2. Free quota used up. The hourly slots are taken in order of submission. ViaBTC suggests resubmitting at the start of the next hour.
3. Transaction larger than 0.5 kB. Payments that spend many small inputs, and batched withdrawals, are often too large.
4. Unconfirmed parent. If your transaction spends an output that is itself unconfirmed, ViaBTC refuses it. CPFP was designed exactly for this chain problem.
5. Double spend. If a replacement exists for the same inputs, the submission is rejected.