How to solve pending transactions on Ethereum (2024)

If you are one of the many people that own an Ethereum wallet and launched a few transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, then chances are you faced a long-running transaction. Some people even reported having to wait for hours, days, or even months, hoping their transaction would eventually be processed by the miners.

Since Ethereum transactions have to be processed sequentially, users can get completely stuck. In other words, the longest-running transaction has to be processed before any more recent transaction from that wallet has a chance to be processed.

Why are my transactions not being processed?

Ethereum transactions are not being processed because they are not getting picked up by a miner. But why? Miners receive the transaction and code-processing fees (gas) for each block of transactions they process as part of their reward. If your transaction is not being mined, it means there are enough other transactions on the network willing to pay a higher fee to the miners to get processed. Thus, if the network is very busy, the transaction costs will be higher and vice versa.

So how do I know which fee (gas price) is sufficient?

The Venly wallet automatically sets the correct gas price based on the network consumption, making it very easy for the user to get their transactions processed. Advanced users have the option to modify the gas price for their transaction; higher to get it processed more quickly or lower leading to a lower transaction cost but also slower processing time.

If you are using a different wallet, which might not support fluctuating gas prices, you can always set it manually, if your wallet allows it. To get an idea of the recommended gas price you can look at the gas tracker from Etherscan.

How to fix a long-running transaction

So what if you have launched a transaction with a gas price that is too low to be of any interest to the miners. Easy, you just relaunch the same transaction, but this time with a higher gas price, high enough so it will be picked up. Now you will have two transactions almost identical, one with a low gas price and one with a high gas price. The only problem left to solve is to make sure, that only one gets processed at the end.

At the beginning of this post, I said that on the Ethereum blockchain transactions are being processed sequentially, meaning transaction #2 will be processed before # 3 and so forth. It is also not possible to process transactions with the same sequence number. For example, it is not possible to process 2 transactions that have sequence #3, one of them will be dropped.

This brings us to our solution, when you launch your transaction with a correct gas price, you set the sequence number to the same number as the long-running transaction. The transaction with the higher gas price will be picked up sooner, meaning the sequence number will be processed, and cause the long-running transaction to be dropped because its sequence is outdated.

At Venly we understand that this might sounds complicated, therefore we’ve added a Resubmit button that takes care of all the technical stuff.

We even make it super easy to cancel a pending transaction.

Are there wallets that calculate the gas price automatically for you?

Luckily yes, Venly Wallet, will analyze your transaction and set an average gas price, which you can modify easily to speed up or slow down your transaction. We generally do not advise lowering the gas price as this can result in long-pending transactions.

Sometimes a video says more than words

In this 10min video below we create a ‘stuck’ transaction and show you how you can speed them up or even cancel them.

Note: this is a demo from before our rebranding from Arkane Network to Venly.