Pending or failed transactions

What to do when a transaction is stuck or reverted

Last updated: July 6, 2026.

My transaction is stuck "Pending"

Base normally confirms transactions in 1–3 seconds. Stuck pending almost always means one of:

Underpriced gas. Your wallet quoted a base fee from a moment of low demand; demand spiked before your tx was included. Bump priority and resubmit.
Network congestion. Base sees brief congestion spikes. Usually clears in minutes.
Nonce gap. A previous tx from your wallet is stuck and yours is queued behind it.

How to fix a stuck transaction

Option A — Speed up. In MetaMask / Rabby / Coinbase Wallet, find the pending tx in your activity → click Speed up → confirm. The wallet replaces the original tx with a higher-fee version using the same nonce.

Option B — Cancel. Same flow, but use Cancel. The wallet submits a 0-value self-transfer at the same nonce, replacing the stuck tx.

Option C — Manual replacement. If the wallet's UI doesn't expose Speed up / Cancel:

Note the nonce of the stuck tx (Basescan → your address → tx detail).
Send a 0-value tx to yourself with that exact nonce and a higher gas price.
Once that confirms, the chain advances past the stuck tx.

If you have multiple stuck transactions (e.g., a queue of approvals), you'll need to clear them in nonce order.

My transaction reverted

A reverted transaction means the EVM evaluated the call and decided it couldn't be executed. You paid gas; nothing else happened.

Common causes by transaction type:

Swap reverted

Slippage exceeded. Set higher slippage in Settings (most common cause for memecoins or fee-on-transfer tokens). See Why my swap reverts.
Insufficient allowance. Approve the router for the token, then retry. See Managing Token Allowance.
Insufficient balance. You're trying to spend more than you have, or you don't have enough ETH for gas.
Pool liquidity moved. Quote was based on a price that no longer exists. Retry with a fresh quote.

Liquidity (LP) tx reverted

Slippage on add/remove. Each LP action has its own slippage tolerance.
Out-of-range range parameters. For V3, the lower price must be below the upper price; both must be on a valid tick spacing.
Approval missing for one of the two tokens.

Lock / esALB tx reverted

Approval missing. Approve ALB for the EsToken contract, then retry. If approve "succeeded" but Lock still fails, see Managing Token Allowance and the Changing allowance workaround.

Generic — Basescan tells you why

Open the failed tx on Basescan. The "Revert reason" field often spells out exactly what happened in plain text (e.g., Pancake: INSUFFICIENT_OUTPUT_AMOUNT). When asking for help, paste the revert reason and the tx hash.

I see a transaction I didn't make

If you see an unexplained transaction:

Check the From address. If it's not yours, you're seeing someone else's tx that touches your address (e.g., an airdrop, or someone sending tokens to you).
If From is your address and you didn't initiate it, you may have an unrevoked approval being abused. Immediately:
- Move funds out of that address to a fresh wallet.
- Revoke approvals on the compromised address using revoke.cash or similar.
- For esALB-specific approvals, see Changing allowance.