Can a swap get stuck if I send the deposit with a low gas fee during a congested period

07 September 2026

Yes, it can. If you send the deposit transaction with a gas fee too low for current network conditions, the swap will not proceed until that transaction confirms, and during congestion that can mean a very long wait.

Here is why.

Every swap on a blockchain network like Ethereum or Solana depends on a deposit transaction being accepted into a block. Miners or validators prioritize transactions that pay higher fees. When the network is busy - many users competing for the same limited block space - transactions with low fees can sit in the mempool (the waiting room for unconfirmed transactions) for hours or even days. Some nodes eventually drop very low-fee transactions entirely, meaning you would need to resubmit.

The swap itself does not "get stuck" in the sense of breaking. It simply cannot start until the deposit lands. The swap system watches for your deposit on-chain. Until it sees that transaction confirmed, it does nothing. So the delay is entirely in the network layer, not in the swap logic.

What happens if you send the deposit with a low fee and the network gets congested after you broadcast it? You have a few options.

First, you can wait. Sometimes congestion clears within an hour. If your fee was only slightly below the going rate, it might eventually confirm. Check a block explorer for your transaction's status. If it shows "pending" and has a nonce that matches your wallet's next expected nonce, it is still in play.

Second, many wallets now support "cancel" or "speed up" functions. Cancelling sends a new transaction with the same nonce but a zero value and a higher fee, replacing the original. Speeding up does the same but keeps the original destination and amount, just with a higher gas price. These work only if your wallet supports nonce management and the replacement transaction has a high enough fee to be attractive.

Third, if your wallet does not support those features, you can use a wallet that does, import your seed phrase or private key, and manually broadcast a replacement transaction with a higher gas price. This is technically advanced. If you are not comfortable, wait.

A common mistake is sending the deposit from an exchange or a custodial wallet. In that case, you cannot cancel or speed up the transaction yourself. You must contact that service's support. They control the private keys. Some exchanges will not help. Some will, but slowly.

The swap system itself does not time out aggressively. Most swap services give you a window of several hours to complete the deposit. If the deposit does not confirm within that window, the swap is cancelled and you must start over. The funds return to your wallet (minus network fees already spent). That is not a loss of funds, but it is a loss of time and fees.

If you are in this situation and the deposit eventually confirms after the swap's time window has closed, the system will see the deposit but no longer have an active swap for it. The funds will sit at the swap contract. You will need to contact support to retrieve them. Provide the transaction hash and the swap ID from the session.

Now, if you want to avoid this entirely, the sibling page "Why your swap is stuck and what to do" covers the full set of reasons a swap might stall and the general troubleshooting steps. That page is the natural next read if your swap is currently stuck and you are not sure why.

To summarize the specific case: a low gas fee during congestion will stall the deposit, which stalls the swap. The swap is not broken. The network is slow. You can wait, speed up, or cancel and retry with a realistic fee. The realistic fee is whatever the network's current "fast" or "priority" gas price is at the moment you broadcast. Check that before you send.

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