How to cancel or speed up a stuck transaction

What speed up and cancel actually do

Neither action edits your original transaction, because a broadcast transaction cannot be edited. Both create a new one that reuses the same nonce — the sequence number of transactions from your account — with a higher fee, so that validators prefer it.

A speed-up keeps the same recipient and amount and simply pays more. A cancel sends a replacement that does nothing useful, typically a zero-value transaction to your own address, purely to occupy that nonce so the original cannot be included.

Both are attempts, not guarantees. MetaMask’s documentation frames cancellation the same way: it is something you attempt while a transaction is pending, and it is not a reversal after confirmation.

When a replacement does not work

The original confirms first. If it is included before your replacement propagates, you have paid a fee for the replacement and the original still happened.

The fee increase is too small. Nodes generally require a meaningfully higher fee to accept a replacement, not a token increase.

Your account has no spare gas asset. The replacement needs its own fee. An account that is out of the native asset cannot replace anything.

Later transactions are queued behind it. If you sent several transactions, the stuck one blocks the ones after it, and fixing the queue means dealing with the earliest stuck nonce first.

How to do it

Open the pending transaction in your wallet and look for the speed-up or cancel action; most wallets surface both while a transaction is pending. Confirm the new fee, which will be higher than the original by design.

Then watch the block explorer rather than the wallet. The original hash and the replacement hash are different transactions, and the explorer will show one of them succeeding and the other dropped or replaced. Etherscan documents that dropped-and-replaced state explicitly, and it is the normal, expected outcome of a successful replacement.

If your wallet does not offer the action, the same result can be produced by sending a new transaction manually with the same nonce and a higher fee, but only do that if you are comfortable setting a nonce by hand.

Once it has confirmed

There is no cancel, no reversal and no chargeback. A confirmed transfer to an address you did not intend is a matter for whoever controls that address. If it is an exchange, that is a support process with no guaranteed outcome; if it is a stranger, there is no process at all.

This is the reason for small test transfers and for checking the network and address before sending, not after. Sent on the wrong network covers what is and is not recoverable.

Be especially careful in this moment. Anyone who contacts you offering to recover a confirmed transaction is almost certainly running a recovery scam — see support impersonation scams.