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Here is a simple way for you to cancel a pending transaction in Ethereum metamask year 2022. If you have ever made a transaction on the Ethereum network such as sending tokens or accepting a bid for your NFT, it may have occurred to you that when you made it, it has been pending for days without knowing exactly when it would take place. In this post we will tell you step by step how to speedup or cancel a pending transactions.
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How Ethereum gas fees and transactions work
To give a bit of context to the post, it is useful to know how gas fees and transactions work in Ethereum first.
On the one hand, in Ethereum, because of how the blockchain works, you can only make a certain number of transactions per minute. On the other hand, the gas fees that are paid for each transaction work, as of the date of this post, through an auction system in which the highest bidder gets his transaction to go faster.
In this way, miners are accepting bids and making pending transactions until the network is decongesting and, therefore, lowering the price of gas fees. However, if there are many pending transactions and users start to raise their bids, the gas fees can escalate to exorbitant prices. In this case, high gas fees discourage further congestion of the network at the cost of paralyzing its movement.
Hence, every time you go to make a transaction in Metamask you have 3 options: slow , standard and fast . This is because you are bidding on the low , mid, or high limit of the transaction price range. That is why it is always advisable to use the standard option.
However, on days with a lot of volume, it is perfectly possible that even choosing standard or even fast , you just hit a raise and your transaction will be lost in limbo until the gas fees fall to the price you bid for. The problem is, you don’t know when this is going to happen.
On the other hand, because of how Ethereum works, you cannot make a new transaction if the previous one has not been completed , so if you bid very low and your transaction is pending, you will not be able to do anything else. But nothing happens, because there are options.
How to Streamline or speed up an Ethereum Transaction in Metamask
The simplest option of all to solve a transaction issues is the one that Metamask gives you by default: speed up the transaction . Basically what Metamask does is replace the pending transaction, which has a certain number (for example, transaction number 33), with another with the same number and a higher bid. If you do this and it is fixed, congratulations! You’ve got it!
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How to cancel Ethereum Transaction in Metamask
You can manually cancel a transaction by following these steps below:
Step 1: Activate nonce customization
The first thing we have to do is activate the Ethereum nonce customization in the Metamask configuration. The nonce is the position number and that has a transaction in our wallet. Thus, a transaction with a nonce = 1 will be the first one we make in the history of the wallet. By default, this is chosen automatically, but now we want to be able to modify this data.
cancel-ethereum-transaction
So, we go to our Metamask, click on the circle at the top right and select Settings . Then, we go to Advanced and go down and activate Customize transaction nonce.
Step 2: Find the pending transaction and its nonce
Then, we will go to the transaction that we have pending in Metamask under Activity and click on it to see the details. What we are interested in here is the number you put in nonce . In our case it would be 3 . This would mean that it is our 4th transaction in the wallet (since it starts from 0).
Step 3: Send yourself ETH in a new transaction
Once the nonce customization is activated and we already know the number of nonce that the pending transaction has, we proceed to hit the Send button of metamask in ETH.
What you are going to do now is copy the address of your own wallet (the one you are using to make the transaction) and send yourself 0 ETH . In this case we will mark the fast option.
Then, on the confirmation screen, we will put the nonce number of the pending transaction that we noted earlier in the next section, under “custom nonce” and confirm.
This will replace one with another and basically cancel the pending transaction that was left hanging.
Extra: How to find nonce number for my ETH pending transaction in Metamask?
Sometimes the pending transaction (s) may not appear in Metamask. But don’t worry, because on the blockchain everything can be found.
What we have to do is click on the 3 dots on the top right in Metamask and select “View in Etherscan”, or directly enter our wallet address in Etherscan . There we will find all the transactions of our wallet arranged chronologically, where above means most recent.
In our case we do not have any pending transaction, but we would only have to look for the one that says “pending” under Method and click on the Txn Hash number.
Then, we will click on Click to see More and finally we will be able to see the nonce number, which we can use by following the previous steps.
And that’s it! We hope this guide has helped you. Do you have any doubts? Ask in the comments!
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