Now (01/2022) the commission for a transfer in the Ethereum blockchain can change at any second, and at the same time by a significant amount. And if you sent a transaction where the price for gas was set in the amount of, for example, 45 gwei, then after 20 seconds, the price for gas may increase to 70 gwei and not drop below for several hours or even a day.
What to do in this case? Your transaction is always in the “Pending” status, which can be seen on the in-depth blockchain explorer that shows unconfirmed transactions, for example Etherscan.io.
In this case, you can do the following: send the same transaction, i.e. from the same address to the one you need with the same amount and the same “nonce”, but with an increased gas price, in our case 70 gwei. Then one transaction will overwrite another and your funds will come quickly.
However, difficulties can be caused by the same “nonce”, this is the serial number of the transaction, often it is just the number of the transaction in your wallet, i.e. if you have 35 wallet (address) transactions, then the next transaction will be logical the 36th and, of course, the nonce of this transaction will be 36.
The fact is that in most wallets you cannot choose a nonce for yourself, it is assigned automatically at the moment of polling the blockchain and forming a transaction. However, if the old transaction has not yet been confirmed, then it is not counted as a transaction, and if you stopped at the 36th transaction, then when polling the blockchain, the old nonce will be set in your “new” transaction, i.e. 36. Therefore, by sending a new transaction to the network, with the same 36th nonce, as you sent earlier (but with a low gas price), you actually have two identical transactions in the blockchain, but in one you promise to pay the miners more gwei for processing your transaction.
Then they take the most profitable transaction for them, and the second transaction with a low commission (the price of gas in gwei) is itself canceled.
That is, everything is the same but without details:
– to speed up the transaction, you need to send the exact same transaction, but with a higher commission (gas price).
