Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.
I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.
Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?
Since the market is on a big dip the number of transactions is limited. Because some or most of them hodling their coins. So in my opinion the current market affects also the speed and number of transactions done in a specific time.