Why is my bitcoin pending in Exodus?

What Pending means in Exodus

Exodus tags a bitcoin payment Pending until it has one confirmation, meaning until a miner has put it in a block. Until then it is on the Bitcoin network, waiting in the queue with other payments. Exodus is a self-custody wallet: your bitcoin is held by keys on your own device, not by Exodus, so a pending payment isn’t a hold or a review by Exodus. A payment waits longer when its fee is lower than what others are paying, when the network is busy, or when a block is slow to arrive. Exodus’s own table puts bitcoin’s typical wait at 60 minutes or less.

Find the transaction ID and look it up

On a phone, open your Bitcoin wallet in Exodus, scroll down to its activity and tap the payment: its details include the transaction ID, which you can tap and hold to copy. On a computer, open the Wallet, choose Bitcoin, click the arrow next to the payment, and click the copy icon beside the transaction ID. Paste it into UTXOHub’s search. The payment’s page says whether it is waiting or confirmed and, if it is waiting, roughly when it will probably confirm and what speeding it up would cost right now.

• A Bitcoin transaction ID has 64 characters, digits and the letters a to f. Copy it whole rather than retyping it.
• If you send bitcoin that is itself still pending, Exodus says the new payment stays pending too, until the first one confirms.
• Each confirmation makes a payment harder to reverse. Whoever receives it decides how many to wait for.

Speed up a bitcoin payment you sent with Accelerate

On a phone, open your Bitcoin wallet, tap the pending payment, then tap Accelerate. Exodus shows the extra fee before you tap Accelerate again. On a computer, click the arrow next to the payment, click Accelerate, and confirm. Exodus picks one of two methods, depending on how the payment was sent. If you set a custom fee, replace-by-fee (RBF) was switched on, and Exodus sends a new version of the payment with a higher fee, which has a new transaction ID. If you used the recommended fee, RBF was off by default, so Exodus instead spends the change from your payment back to yourself with a high fee. This is called child pays for parent (CPFP): miners take both payments together, and you then see two payments, the original and a send to yourself.

• Accelerate appears only when your Bitcoin wallet has enough left to pay the extra fee, and only in Exodus Mobile and Desktop.
• Child pays for parent works only if your payment sent some change back to your wallet. A payment of your whole balance has none.
• Exodus warns that accelerating can cost more than a regular fee. Our payment page shows what a faster fee costs right now.
• Exodus also lists other services that speed up payments, which it says it isn’t part of. Our speed-up guide explains how they work.

Cancel a bitcoin payment before it confirms

Exodus has no Cancel button. Its help says the way to cancel a waiting bitcoin payment is in Electrum, another wallet: you open your Exodus wallet in Electrum with your 12-word secret key, right-click the payment and choose Cancel (double-spend). That sends the same bitcoin back to you with a higher fee, so it only works if RBF was on, which in Exodus means you set a custom fee. Once the original confirms, nothing can reverse it. Typing your secret key into another app gives that app your bitcoin, so Exodus says to do it only with software you trust completely, downloaded from its own website.

• Exodus says Electrum can’t open addresses that start bc1p.
• If a payment can’t be sped up, Exodus says it stays pending until the network drops it, with no set time, and the bitcoin then shows in your wallet again.

If bitcoin sent to Exodus isn’t showing

Ask the sender for the transaction ID and look it up. If it is still waiting, there is nothing wrong with Exodus: it needs a block, and Exodus suggests asking the sender to speed it up. If an exchange sent it and the ID isn’t found, the exchange may not have sent it yet. If it has confirmed and paid your address but Exodus doesn’t show it, Exodus suggests refreshing the wallet. On a phone, tap the profile icon, then Settings, Refresh Networks and Refresh. On a computer, open the Portfolio, choose Bitcoin, click its logo and click Refresh.

• Check that the address the payment went to is your Exodus Bitcoin address, character for character.
• Exodus also suggests updating to its latest version, since an old one can show the wrong balance.

Fake Exodus support

Exodus says no one, not even Exodus Support, should ever ask for your 12-word secret key, and warns against messages from people claiming to be support. Its help pages give two ways to reach its support: an email to support@exodus.com, and the chat in the app. Search results for Exodus support include pages from other sites advertising phone numbers. Speeding up a payment in Exodus never needs your secret key, so never type it into a website or give it to anyone who offers help.