My Transaction Has Been Pending for a Long Time. What Can I Do?

A transaction that has been pending for hours is almost always waiting on one thing: the fee you offered is too low for the network right now, so block producers keep picking other people's transactions first. Your money has not gone anywhere. It is sitting in the queue, and in most cases you can either push it through or cancel it from the same wallet that sent it.

Think of a crowded post office where people can pay extra to jump ahead. Your parcel is on the counter, and everyone paying more keeps going first.

First, check it is really pending

Paste the transaction hash into a block explorer - Etherscan for Ethereum, Solscan for Solana. Pending means not yet included in a block. If it says failed, that is a different thing entirely and cannot be undone. If the explorer has never heard of the hash, your wallet may not have broadcast it at all; restarting the wallet usually clears that.

Speed up or cancel

Most wallets, MetaMask included, offer both. Speed up sends the same transaction again with a higher fee. Cancel sends an empty transaction to yourself with a higher fee. Whichever is picked up first wins, and only one of them can ever be recorded. Both cost money - cancel is a replacement, not an undo. Raise the fee meaningfully, roughly 15 to 25 per cent above the old one, or the network rejects the replacement as underpriced.

When one stuck transaction blocks everything

Ethereum numbers your transactions in order, and they have to be processed in that order. One cheap transaction stuck at the front holds up every later one from the same wallet, however generous their fees. Clear the oldest pending transaction first and the rest usually go through within a minute. Solana behaves differently: transactions expire after a short window rather than queueing forever, so a stuck one normally just disappears and you send again.

Before sending anything large, check the current fee level rather than trusting your wallet's default. What gas fees are explains why that number moves, and why a transaction fails covers what to do when the explorer says failed rather than pending.