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How to “cancel” an Ethereum transaction

2 min readMay 19, 2020

Technique: sending a 0 ETH transaction to yourself with the same nonce as the pending transaction will drop the pending transaction.

Note: make sure to send the cancel transaction with a higher gas price than the pending transaction.

Step 1: Find the pending transaction nonce. Go to Etherscan and search for your address. Find the lowest nonce that is pending.

Step 2: Send a 0 ETH transaction to yourself with the same nonce as the pending transaction.

Ledger Hardware Wallet:

Option 1: Use the MyCrypto desktop app and edit the nonce under the Advanced section.

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MyCrypto desktop app

Trust Wallet:

Edit the nonce manually.

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Trust Wallet mobile

MetaMask:

MetaMask has a cancel button in the interface but sometimes it doesn’t allow you to set a custom gas price. If the cancel button doesn’t do the trick you can edit the nonce manually. (Must toggle this feature on in advanced settings)

Note: This also works with hardware wallets connected to MetaMask.

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MetaMask Browser Extension

Success: once your cancel transaction is successful your previously pending transaction will be “dropped and replaced”.

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Success

Final Note: You may not need to cancel your transaction if you didn’t change your mind and only want to “Speed up” the gas price. In this case you can re-send the transaction with a higher gas price using the same nonce as the transaction you want to speed-up and the lower priced transaction will be dropped.

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