Check this transaction, it is sent by a mining pool with 0.08$ fee, and it is almost mined with in minutes. How is this possible? Current average gas price is 150, that is almost 10$
1 Answer
There's no rule that prevents a miner from accepting transactions with low or zero fees. Mining pools privilege their own transactions, without having them published in the pending pool. The software they use to create blocks will select their transactions before others.