How do I get stuck transaction due to low gas to go through?

Question

I have a MetaMask wallet and sent a bunch of transactions through with too low of gas. So they're stuck. They don't even show up as pending, they just are 'not found' on etherscan.

I've tried sending transactions through with very high gas price, but they don't go through either. From my reading (could be wrong) I need to resend the lower-nonce transactions with a higher gas to unstick them, and I can effectively cancel them by sending 0 ETH to myself.

However the only way I can find to do this is through myetherwallet.com and specifically by pasting the metamask private key into the website to sign the transaction (on https://www.myetherwallet.com/#offline-transaction)

Am I right about all this? Is there no secure way to send a transaction where you explicitly specify the nonce?

Answer 1

If you were able to send the transactions they should be visible in the transaction pool. Getting a transaction hash doesn't mean it got relayed to the network. My guess is that the transactions never reached anywhere beyond your own client/node.

So, as the transactions really "didn't happen", you can't resend them.

I suggest trying to find reasons why the transactions failed completely. Maybe your client already blocked them and doesn't inform you about it properly?

Answer 2

You can speed up the transaction (resubmit it with same nonce but higher gas fee) through MetaMask’s own “Speed up” button as explained here.

Alternatively you may achieve the same effect by composing an equivalent transaction, but before sending it out, manually editing its nonce to be the same as that of the “stuck” (pending) transaction you are replacing (to do this, you must have enabled ⋮ > Settings > Advanced > Customize transaction nonce in MetaMask). Note that the remote Ethereum client (Infura) will reject the new transaction if the new gas fee does not exceed the older gas fee by a certain percentage.