How to Speed Up or Cancel a Pending Transaction

Speed up and cancel look like two different buttons, but underneath they do the same thing: your wallet broadcasts a replacement transaction carrying the same nonce - the counter that fixes its place in your queue - and a higher fee. Speed up keeps the original destination and amount. Cancel swaps them for an empty transfer to yourself. Only one transaction with a given nonce can ever confirm, so whichever the network takes first wins, and the other simply disappears.

Speed up: same trip, better ticket

Open your wallet's activity list, find the pending entry and tap Speed up. The wallet proposes a new fee and you confirm. One rule surprises people: the new offer has to be meaningfully higher, in practice at least ten percent above the original, or the network refuses to swap and you have simply wasted a click. MetaMask, Trust Wallet and Coinbase Wallet all follow this. If the network is genuinely congested, bid well past the minimum rather than nudging it and trying again twice.

Cancel: the replacement that does nothing

Cancel sends zero coins from your address back to your address, at the same nonce, with a higher fee. When it confirms, your original payment is gone for good. Two things to be clear about. You still pay gas for the cancellation, because it is a real transaction. And this is not a refund button - if the original already confirmed, nothing on earth reverses it, which is why sending to a wrong address is permanent.

When neither button works

Sometimes Speed up is greyed out or missing. That usually means the wallet has lost track of the transaction - it was sent from another device, or the local history was cleared. The fix is to do by hand what the button would have done: look up the pending transaction's nonce and send a replacement at that exact number. Modifying or cancelling by hand covers the steps.

Whatever you do, do not send the payment a second time from scratch while the first is pending. It lands behind the stuck one and you may end up paying twice. Keep a small balance of the network's own coin aside purely for replacement fees - that is what makes either button usable when you need it. If the stall itself is new to you, start with why transactions get stuck.