Can a Bitcoin transaction be cancelled or reversed?

Check whether it has confirmed

Look up the payment’s transaction ID on UTXOHub. If it says Confirmed, it is in a block and can’t be cancelled. If it is still waiting, the wallet that sent it may be able to cancel it, as long as you act before it goes into a block. Blocks come about every ten minutes on average, so a payment with a fee high enough for the next block leaves little time.

If it is still waiting: cancel it in the wallet that sent it

Bitcoin has no cancel message. A wallet cancels a payment by sending a new version that spends the same coins back to an address in your own wallet, with a higher fee. Nodes then drop the old version, and once the new one confirms, the old one can never confirm. This is the same replacement a wallet uses to speed a payment up, called replace-by-fee, but paying you instead of the recipient. Look for Cancel on the waiting payment. Wallets usually offer it only for payments marked as replaceable, which many mark by default. Since Bitcoin Core 28.0, nodes accept a replacement by default even when the first version wasn’t marked, but your wallet still has to offer the option.

• Electrum: open the payment’s menu in the History tab and choose Cancel (double-spend).
• BlueWallet: Cancel appears on sends you made from it, when it can replace them.
• Trezor Suite: Cancel appears on pending Bitcoin payments on a computer, from version 25.3.1, but not on a phone.

Cancelling costs a fee, and can fail

Nodes running Bitcoin Core accept the new version only if it pays at least the old version’s whole fee, plus a little more for its own size. That fee goes to the miner, so you get back what you sent minus a fee higher than the first. Cancelling is a race: if a miner puts the original in a block first, the cancel fails and the payment stands. Trezor warns that the bitcoin can then no longer be got back. Afterwards, look up the old transaction ID: once UTXOHub has seen the replacement, it says Replaced and links to the new version, whose page shows when the bitcoin is back with you.

Once it has confirmed, only the recipient can send it back

A confirmed Bitcoin payment can’t be reversed. Nobody can take it back: not the sender, a wallet maker, a miner or UTXOHub. Bitcoin.org says a Bitcoin payment “can only be refunded by the person receiving the funds.” If you know who received it, ask them to send it back in a new payment. If it went to an exchange or another service’s deposit address, contact that service through its official app or website with the transaction ID, the address and the amount. There is no chargeback, so recovery depends on whoever controls the address.

If an app, an exchange or someone else sent it

Only the wallet that signed a payment can replace it. When an exchange or a payment app sends bitcoin for you, it sends from a wallet it controls, so only that service could cancel it; ask its support, and expect that it may not. Our guides for Cash App, Coinbase, PayPal and Venmo, Robinhood and Kraken say what each one’s own help pages allow. If someone is paying you, you can’t cancel their payment. If you don’t want it, wait until it confirms and send it back, because a refund sent before then could leave you paying twice if they replace their payment.

Why sellers wait for a confirmation

Cancelling works on any payment the sender’s wallet can replace, including one to a shop or a person selling something. A buyer who cancels a waiting payment after you hand the goods over has taken them for nothing. That is why a payment with zero confirmations isn’t final, and why a seller should wait for at least one confirmation before handing anything over.

A payment that disappears isn’t cancelled

By default, nodes running Bitcoin Core drop a payment that has waited 336 hours, which is two weeks, and an explorer may stop showing it. That doesn’t cancel it: any wallet or node that still has it can send it out again, and it can still confirm. The only sure way to cancel it is a replacement that confirms. So don’t send the same amount again just because the first payment has vanished, or you may pay twice.

Nobody can reverse it for a fee

Offers to reverse, cancel or recover a Bitcoin payment for a fee are a known scam. The US Federal Trade Commission warns that scammers offer to get lost crypto back, ask for a fee first, and that anyone who pays it loses that money too. Cancelling a waiting payment needs only your own wallet, and a confirmed one can’t be undone by anyone. Never give anyone your recovery words or private keys.