Networks and Transactions

What happens when you press send

A transfer is a signed instruction, not a message to a company. Your wallet signs it with your private key and broadcasts it to the network, where it waits in a queue of unconfirmed transactions. Validators or miners select transactions to include in the next block, generally preferring those offering a higher fee per unit of block space. Inclusion in a block is the first confirmation; each later block makes reversal progressively less plausible.

That single sequence explains most of the questions people arrive with: pending means not yet included, a high fee means competition for block space, and a failed transaction on a smart-contract network can still consume fees because the work was done before the failure.

High-level questions these guides answer

• Why is my transfer pending? It has been broadcast but not yet included in a block, usually because the fee is below what the current queue is clearing.
• Why are fees high right now? Fees reflect demand for limited block space at this moment, not a fixed price list set by anyone.
• Why did my transaction fail and still cost money? On smart-contract networks the network performs work before the failure is known, and that work is paid for.
• Why did funds not arrive on the other side? Most often the transfer was sent on a different network than the receiver expected.
• Is a Layer 2 the same asset? It is the same asset represented on a different network, with different fees, different finality behaviour and different withdrawal mechanics.

How Ethereum transactions, gas and failures fit together

On Ethereum every transaction pays for computation in gas. Your wallet sets a gas limit — the most work you allow — and a fee per unit of gas made of a protocol base fee, which is burned, plus an optional priority tip for the validator. The total cost is the gas actually used multiplied by that per-unit price, which is why the same transfer can cost very different amounts at different times.

A transaction can be included in a block and still fail, for example if it runs out of gas or a contract rejects it. The gas used up to the failure is still paid, because validators did that work. Approvals and signatures sit alongside this: an approval is itself an on-chain transaction that costs gas and grants a contract permission to move your tokens later, which is why checking what you sign matters as much as what you pay.

Layer 2 networks execute transactions off the main chain and post data back to Ethereum, so fees are usually lower but withdrawal and finality behaviour differ, and moving assets between networks through a bridge adds its own risks. Each of these steps has its own guide in the section above. We do not yet publish dedicated guides on nonces or stuck Ethereum transactions, and we do not show live gas prices.

A note on live data

We publish current Bitcoin fee conditions because we operate that data pipeline ourselves and document how it is sourced and cached. We do not publish live Ethereum gas figures, because that requires a provider we have not licensed — so our Ethereum page explains the fee mechanism instead of quoting numbers we cannot verify.