Why did my transaction fail, and where is my money?

Start here: a failed transaction does not move money. Whatever you were sending is still in your wallet. What you lost is the gas — the fee for the work the network did before it stopped — and that is usually a few cents to a few dollars, not the amount you were sending.

This is why a failed transaction shows a fee on the explorer and no transfer. The two are not contradictory: the network charges for the attempt, and the attempt did not go through.

Which one happened to yours

Paste the hash and it will say which reason applies, what the gas cost, and — where the chain gave one — the rejection message the contract returned.

Check your transaction

The four reasons, and what each means for you

It ran out of gas

Every transaction carries a gas limit — the most work it is allowed to do. If the work needed exceeds it, the chain stops partway and undoes everything, but keeps the gas already burned.

Your money: Your funds never left. The gas up to the point it stopped is spent and is not refundable.

What to do: Retry with a higher gas limit. If your wallet let you set 21,000 while sending to a contract address, that is the usual cause: a contract runs its own code when it receives coins, and 21,000 is only enough for a transfer to an ordinary wallet.

The contract rejected it

The contract ran, decided the transaction should not proceed, and reverted — often with a message such as "insufficient allowance", "slippage", "expired deadline" or "transfer amount exceeds balance".

Your money: Your funds never left. You paid the gas for the work done before it refused.

What to do: The message names the condition. Slippage and deadline errors mean the price moved while you were signing — retry. An allowance error means the token approval was missing or too small, and the swap needs approving first.

Not enough left for gas

The account had enough of the token but not enough of the native coin — ETH, BNB, MATIC, TRX — to pay the fee. This catches people who move their whole balance and leave nothing behind for the next transaction.

Your money: Nothing moved, and typically nothing was charged either, because it never executed.

What to do: Send a small amount of the native coin to that address, then retry.

It is stuck behind another transaction

Transactions from one account execute in order. If an earlier one is still pending, everything after it waits — even if the later one would succeed on its own.

Your money: Nothing has moved and nothing is lost. It is queued, not failed.

What to do: Find the oldest pending transaction from that account and either speed it up or cancel it. Your wallet usually offers both.

Why you were charged for something that failed

Gas pays for computation, not for outcomes. Thousands of machines executed your transaction to find out whether it was valid; that work happened whether or not the result was kept. It is the same reason a bank charges for a returned payment.

The practical consequence is worth knowing: retrying costs gas again. Retrying the identical transaction without changing what caused the failure will fail again and charge again. Read the reason first.

When a failed transaction is not the problem

Two cases get mistaken for a failure and are much more serious, because in both the money did move:

It succeeded, on the wrong network. The explorer says success, the exchange shows nothing. The funds are at the exchange's address on a chain it does not credit — what each exchange does about that.
It succeeded without a destination tag. On XRP, Stellar and a few others an exchange tells customers apart by a tag or memo. Sent without one, the deposit arrives and is credited to nobody. Support can usually find it.

Both look identical to a failure from the outside — money gone, nothing arrived — and the fix is completely different. That is the distinction the checker exists to make.

Nobody can reverse it, and nobody can recover it

A failed transaction needs no recovery: the money never left. Anyone offering to recover funds from a failed transaction for a fee is describing a service that cannot exist. The same goes for a successful transaction — it cannot be reversed by anyone, including us, including the exchange, including the network.

Where funds genuinely need retrieving — a deposit on an unsupported network — it is the exchange that does it, through its own process, at its own published price. Never through a third party who found you first.

If that was not your case

If the transfer reached an exchange and was never credited, the answer depends on that exchange's own rules: what each of the 11 exchange does about it.

No wallet connection. No seed phrase. Read-only — we never ask for one, and no legitimate service ever will.