Underpriced transaction error

[T0BiD]

There are already several posts on reddit and the infura forum but I wanted to create an issue since there hasn't been an official answer on what's going on.

Every now and then, our transactions get rejected with the following error: Error processing transaction request: transaction underpriced.

This happens mostly when there are sudden jumps in the basfee.

My understanding of Ethereum is that such transactions should go into the mem-pool and not get rejected by the node (you).
Generally people should be able to send underpriced transactions, no matter the reason.

So the question remains, why do you not allow this?

[sanchopansa]

Since a few weeks I've been having this problem for virtually any replacement transaction that I try to send. It fails immediately with

Error: [ethjs-rpc] while formatting outputs from RPC '{"value":{"code":-32000, "message":"replacement transaction underpriced"}}

That's regardless of the gas price I set, even if I set a gas price which is 2-3x higher than the current base fee and also much higher than the gwei price of the existing tx (so it shouldn't be related to the txpool.pricebump parameter)

Anyone have an idea what might be the reason?

It's a very bad UX to not be able to speed up transactions, especially as on some occasions the default base fee set by dapps/Metamask is too low and this means you can have a transaction remain pending for hours and your EOA is completely blocked. Can also lead to substantial loss of money if it's a transaction that should urgently go through.