extension: Transaction delay causes nonce issue and 'locked' wallet for many hours

I have gone through this issue on many occasions now over many weeks and it makes the network quite impotent for things like limited NFTs.

Initiate a transaction via the web wallet. The correct nonce is generated. Let’s say, 285.
A txid is created but it does not show in the explorer (nor, obviously, under Activity in the wallet).
I initiate a second transaction a few minutes later and a new txid is generated which is shown in the explorer immediately with the next nonce; 286.
Now I have nonce 285 (which is still not shown) and nonce 286 (which is ‘pending’ in the explorer).
If I try a third transaction, the web wallet goes back to nonce 285 and issues the same initial txid, which still does not show in the explorer.

And then I’m stuck; my wallet is useless for many hours. Even if I manually go to the next nonce (287) with a third transaction (and get a new txid), that will usually not show in the explorer either. But even if it does, it’s moot because none of them will go through until that first txid that is missing in action shows up.

When I come back 6 or so hours later it is usually resolved but everything that came after the missing txid either never shows up or fails because it’s taken so long. Meanwhile, many other wallets and transactions are going through just fine in a timely manner. Even that second txid that is ‘pending’ would have gone through quite quickly if it weren’t for the fact that the prior nonce is nowhere to be found for hours.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 3 years ago
Reactions: 6
Comments: 22 (4 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Interesting update.

The original txid w/ nonce 285 that did not show in the stacks.co explorer, did show up immediately in the planbetter.org explorer. However, after about 2 hours it dropped from there and is now showing as “Transaction not found” in both explorers.

So, I tried a nonce 285 transaction again for a Stacks Pop and this time, it produced a new txid. But as before, it is not showing in the stacks.co explorer, and it is in the planbetter.org explorer. I imagine the same series of events will occur and it will eventually show up as not found in the latter explorer, too.

Either way, unless I can get a transaction with nonce 285 to successfully broadcast to the stacks.co explorer, my wallet is effectively useless (as are all pending/missing transactions after nonce 285).

gigawatson on Sep 19, 2021

@gigawatson I’m not seeing that “Non-canonical” message in either the Hiro or PlanBetter explorers when checking now, so it appears to have been temporarily displayed? It’s the first I’ve ever seen it in general. @aulneau may have insight on what it means.

The moment a transaction does not show up in the explorer AND I initiate another transaction by manually advancing the nonce +1 past the missing transaction’s nonce (or the web wallet does if for me), my average time to confirmation jumps to 5 hours.

I’m not sure why these wait time differences would be the case, but I’d suggest filing this observed behavior directly in the API repository since I suspect the potential problem and solution are API or node-side.

What am I to do at this point? The previous “nonce issue” was resolved by pushing the UI change to the wallet to allow people to adjust the nonce manually but this issue is different and not resolved by adjusting nonces.

I’m seeing the nonce listed now on your address page as 308. All pending or “in microblock” transactions appear to have nonces of 307 or below.

I’m inclined to suggest you try another transaction, this one with 307, to see if it succeeds (though I realize you’ve tried this manual setting approach before and it hasn’t worked, so I’m 🤞 here a bit). Want to give that a go?

We’ll be investigating and discussing these issues in general as a team as our top priority this week.

markmhendrickson on Sep 20, 2021

What is this?

CleanShot 2021-09-19 at 17 22 34@2x

gigawatson on Sep 20, 2021

@markmhx

What am I to do at this point? The previous “nonce issue” was resolved by pushing the UI change to the wallet to allow people to adjust the nonce manually but this issue is different and not resolved by adjusting nonces.

I am now 23 hours without the ability to transact at all. My last successful nonce was 284.

The next nonce, 285, will not show in the mempool and yet I get the “nonce conflict” error in the web wallet when trying another transaction with nonce 285.

gigawatson on Sep 19, 2021

I have found that sometimes (or all the time?) these transactions get mined even though they do not appear in the explorer or the “activity” tab of the Hiro Wallet extension for web. This behavior seems unrelated by how full the mempool is.

314159265359879 on Sep 18, 2021