How to Cancel or Modify Ethereum Pending Transaction?

Blockchain technology safeguards digital data transmitted across multiple peer-to-peer network nodes, enabling trust, transparency, accuracy, and immutability. And Ethereum has established itself as the most popular platform for the decentralized applications (dApps) by providing security and restricting unauthorized alterations and counterfeiting.

However, it did allow its users to change or cancel an Ethereum transaction if they hadn’t received any confirmation on the network. Ethereum transactions get recorded on the blockchain but not while they are in the mempool or otherwise referred being in a transaction queue or txpool. This article will explain how a user can cancel or change an Ethereum transaction using crypto wallet tools.

Contents

What are Ethereum Transactions?

An Ethereum transaction is a digitally signed message sent from one Ethereum account to another. It carries a set of instructions to transfer Ether or interact with a smart contract on the blockchain. Things that play a key role in an Ethereum transaction are

Address: Every Ethereum transaction has a sender’s address and a receiver’s address.
Signature: Each and every transaction is digitally signed by the sender’s private key, which helps to validate its authenticity.
Transaction Amount: The transactions are made to send currency, so it’s obvious that they will have the instruction of the exact amount of ETH to send from one address to another.
Gas Fee: Whenever a transaction is done, you need to pay for it as gas fees.
Smart Contract: Transactions can also be used to trigger functions within deployed smart contracts, enabling complex decentralized applications (dApps).

What is Gas Fee?

It is a fee paid to a validator as an incentive to process the transaction and add it to the block of a blockchain. Every blockchain transaction needs fees to be paid and, in Ethereum, it’s known as gas fees. Gas fees basically function as bidding to get your transaction approved.

To ensure the security and integrity of the network, validators are selected based on the amount of ETH they have staked. A wrong validation will make them lose more ETH than the gas fee provided.

There are two main factors that determine the gas fee:

Gas Limit: Simply put, it’s the maximum amount of gas fees you are willing to spend on a transaction. You can place it low or high depending on your capacity and urgency.
Gas Price: It is the amount you are willing to pay per unit of gas. Gas price is measured in gwei, where 1 gwei is 0.000000001 ETH.

Why is Gas Fee important?

Gas fee makes the process smoother and determine transaction efficiency. These fees fluctuate based on network demand and the complexity of the transaction. The higher the demand and traffic, the higher the fees. Similarly, the lower the demand and traffic, the lower the fees.

The highest gas fee ever paid on Ethereum was a staggering $24 million for a single transaction in 2021. It was not intentional but a mistake, not by a user but a crypto exchange.

Why do transactions get stuck on the Ethereum blockchain?

If you have sent a transaction and even after a long time you still haven’t received a confirmation on the receiver’s address, that means your transaction is stuck in the long queue and validators don’t want to give it preference. There are various reasons for a transaction to get stuck in the queue. They are:

Low Gas Fees: If you have paid low gas fees, validators will simply overlook your transaction for any other transaction with higher gas fees.
Network Congestion: High network activity will lead to delays. If the network is congested, your transaction will be stuck for some time. And if you paid lower gas fees than others, then again you are far behind them in the queue. This leads users to pay higher priority fees for quicker transaction execution.

Ethereum Gas Tracker — ETH Gas fee tracker | Source: Etherscan

Nonce Gap: Ethereum blockchain handles transactions using nonce, a unique number given on address. A lower nonce transaction will be handled before a higher nonce transaction. All the other transactions in the wallet with higher nuance values may be delayed for a wallet if one of its transactions with a low nuance value is pending.

Understanding Transaction Status

Now let’s understand the stages of an Ethereum transaction to get a complete overview:

Pending: An Ethereum transaction is called pending when it is broadcasted on the network but validators haven’t added it into a block. If you have sent a transaction but it hasn’t been confirmed for a long time, low gas fees is likely to bet the reason. There are higher chances that others have paid more fees in given network conditions.
Queued: Your Ethereum transaction will be kept on hold if there is another transaction in pending stage with a lower nonce. Ethereum processes transactions in order of nonce so every transaction will be completed in ascending order only.
Cancelled: When a transaction can not be validated, it gets cancelled. This can happen when a new transaction with higher fees and nullified data feeds on the same nonce is available.
Failed: A transaction is labeled as a failure if validators don’t add it to the blockchain. It could be due to multiple reasons:

Low Gas
Insufficient Balance
Network Reset
Wrong Address

If you send ETH to a non-existent address, or to an address of a different chain, it would be like burning those ETHs and losing those funds.

How to Cancel Ethereum Transaction?

Now let’s get on the steps to cancel a transaction on Ethereum blockchain.

Check Transaction Status

Go to Etherscan.io and search your transaction using the transaction hash.
If it says “ Success”, there is no way to cancel it.

If it says “Pending”, you might still have a chance.
You can see in the image that the transaction is pending at nonce value 15

Create New Transaction

Set the recipient’s address.
Set Amount to 0 ETH.
Enable custom nonce in settings and enable custom mode.

Customize Transaction Nonce — Source: Etherscan

Set The Same Nonce

Find the nonce of the pending transaction from your wallet or through Etherscan.
Manually enter this nonce for the new transaction.
Same nonce is used to replace the previous transaction with new one.

Increase Gas Fee

Set a gas fee much higher than the pending transaction. To be safe, keep it at least 30% up.

Send Your Transaction

Now, submit and wait. If the network processes your new transaction first with the same nonce as a pending one, the stuck transaction will fail, as two transactions can not have the same nonce on blockchain.

While you can cancel an Ethereum transaction with this method, you can also speed it up. All you have to do is enter the recipient’s address where you want to send ETH and increase the gas fees so that validators can pick it quickly.

How to use Crypto Wallets to Modify Ethereum Transactions?

There are few crypto wallets that will allow you to cancel or boost up a transaction, and one of the most used crypto wallets is Metamask.

Open your Metamask wallet and find the pending transaction in your activity tab.
Click on the “ Cancel” Or “Speed Up” button, depending on what you want.

Enter higher gas fee.
Confirm and send the transaction.

Conclusion

As blockchain adoption grows, more tools and features are emerging to make crypto safer and more user-friendly. From regular traders to NFT collectors and DeFi users, everyone benefits from understanding how to manage their transactions properly.

Cancelling an Ethereum transaction might sound complex at first, but it’s actually one of those critical skills every crypto user should learn. While blockchain is known for its immutability, Ethereum gives users a small window to make amendment only if the transaction is still at pending stage.

The user can effectively cancel a transaction by creating a second transaction using nonce replacement but with a higher gas fee. It is like overwriting a pending transaction with a new transaction. Wallets like MetaMask make it even simpler with “Cancel” and “Speed Up” buttons, giving users more control than ever.