What Is a Transaction Hash (TXID) and How Do You Check One?

1. What is a transaction hash?

A blockchain transaction is a small block of data: who is paying, who is being paid, how much, what fee, and a signature. Run that data through the network's hash function and you get a fixed-length number. That number is the transaction hash. Any change to the data produces a different number, so the hash works as a fingerprint: it names exactly one transaction and no other.

Nodes, wallets and explorers use the hash as the lookup key. When you broadcast a transaction, the node that accepts it hands the hash back. When your wallet shows "pending", it is polling the network for that hash. When an exchange asks for proof of a deposit, the hash is what it checks. It is the only reference you need to track a payment from broadcast to confirmation.

The hash itself proves nothing. It is a lookup key, and what the explorer shows when you open it is the proof.

2. Is a transaction hash the same as a transaction ID?

Yes. Transaction hash, transaction ID, TXID, tx hash, txn hash and hash ID all refer to the same string. The vocabulary depends on where you are: Bitcoin software says txid, Ethereum tools say transaction hash or txn hash, and exchanges often say TXID or hash ID on their withdrawal screens. Solana is the one place where the term differs in substance. Its transaction ID is the transaction's first signature rather than a hash of the whole transaction, so its documentation says "signature".

Two things are often confused with it and are not the same. A wallet address identifies an account, not a payment (on Bitcoin it starts with 1, 3 or bc1). A block hash identifies a whole block containing many transactions. If an exchange rejects the string you pasted, check that you did not copy one of those.

3. What does a transaction hash look like?

The format depends on the chain, and it is usually enough to tell which network a hash belongs to:

The Bitcoin example is the first transaction ever recorded, the coinbase of the genesis block mined on 3 January 2009; you can open it on mempool.space. The Ethereum example is the one used in the ethereum.org developer documentation. Both are 32 bytes written as hexadecimal, which is why they are 64 characters long; the 0x prefix is Ethereum's convention for "this is hex". Litecoin, Dogecoin and Bitcoin Cash inherit Bitcoin's format, and every EVM network inherits Ethereum's, so a transaction on Polygon or Base looks exactly like one on Ethereum mainnet.

A Solana transaction ID is the transaction's signature: 64 bytes of Ed25519 signature encoded in base58 rather than hex, which is why it is longer and contains both upper- and lower-case letters. XRP Ledger hashes are the same 256 bits as Bitcoin's, written in upper case by convention.

4. How is a transaction hash generated?

Each chain hashes its own serialisation of the signed transaction, and the differences explain a few things you will run into.

Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash

The txid is the double SHA-256 of the transaction in its traditional serialisation, which leaves out the witness (signature) data of SegWit inputs; the witness is covered by a second identifier, the wtxid. That is how BIP 141 defines it, and it is why a transaction that spends only SegWit outputs cannot have its txid altered by a third party before confirmation.

Ethereum and EVM chains

The hash is the Keccak-256 of the signed, serialised transaction, so it only exists once the transaction is signed: libraries such as ethers return null for the hash of an unsigned transaction. The node returns the 32-byte hash as the result of eth_sendRawTransaction, and the same value is what you pass to eth_getTransactionByHash and eth_getTransactionReceipt.

Solana

There is no separate hash. The first Ed25519 signature on the transaction, 64 bytes shown as a base58 string, is used as its ID.

XRP Ledger

A SHA-512Half hash (the first 256 bits of a SHA-512) of the signed transaction's binary form, prefixed with the bytes TXN before hashing, written as 64 upper-case hex characters.

The definitions are in BIP 141, the Ethereum JSON-RPC specification, the Solana terminology page and the XRP Ledger data types reference.

What all of them share: the hash is computed by whoever signs the transaction, before it reaches the network. Your wallet knows the hash the instant you tap send, which is why it can show it while the transaction is still unconfirmed.

5. Where do I find my transaction hash?

It depends on who sent the transaction.

Self-custody wallet (MetaMask, Ledger, Trust Wallet, Phantom, Electrum)

Open the transaction in the wallet's activity or history list. The details screen shows the hash, usually with a copy button and a "view on explorer" link that opens it for you.

Exchange withdrawal

Go to the withdrawal history. Once the exchange has broadcast the transaction, the row shows a TXID, often as a link. If the row still says processing, the hash does not exist yet because nothing has been signed.

Someone paid you

Ask them for the hash, or open your receiving address on a block explorer: every transaction that touched the address is listed with its hash.

Your own code

The broadcast call returns it. With the ChainGate SDK it is the transactionId field on the result of signAndBroadcast(), on Bitcoin and Ethereum alike (see section 10).

Copy the whole string. Exchanges reject hashes with a missing character or an extra space, and a Bitcoin txid pasted into an Ethereum explorer will simply not be found.

6. How do I check a transaction with its hash?

Paste it into a block explorer for the network the transaction was sent on. The explorer shows whether the transaction is pending or confirmed, how many confirmations it has, the block that included it, the sender and the recipient, the amount, the fee paid and, on Ethereum, whether the execution succeeded or failed.

Read the status first. "Pending" or "unconfirmed" means the network has the transaction but no block has included it yet. "Success" with one or more confirmations means the money moved. "Fail" or "dropped" means it did not, and on Ethereum the fee was still paid. For what each field on an Ethereum transaction page means, read the Etherscan guide.

7. Why can't I find my transaction on the explorer?

A "transaction not found" page is almost always one of these:

Wrong network

The hash is from a different chain than the explorer. A USDT withdrawal can travel on Ethereum, Tron, BNB Smart Chain or Polygon, and each has its own explorer. Match the explorer to the network you chose at withdrawal.

Too early

A transaction takes a few seconds to propagate, and an exchange may show the TXID a moment before explorers index it. Wait a minute and refresh.

It never went on-chain

Transfers between two accounts of the same exchange, and card or bank payments, are recorded in the company's database rather than on a blockchain, so there is no hash to find. Only on-chain sends get one.

It was replaced

If the transaction was sped up, cancelled or bumped with replace-by-fee, the replacement has a new hash and the network drops the old one. The next section explains why.

It expired

A Bitcoin transaction with too low a fee is dropped from nodes' mempools after about two weeks. The funds are spendable again and the old txid refers to nothing.

The Bitcoin fee guide explains how to pick a fee that confirms, and what to do when one is stuck.

8. Can a transaction hash change?

A confirmed transaction's hash never changes: it is part of the block, and altering it would alter the block. Before confirmation, the hash can be superseded by another transaction, which from the outside looks like a change.

On Ethereum and other EVM chains, speeding up or cancelling a pending transaction means signing a new transaction with the same nonce and a higher fee, as MetaMask's help page describes. The network keeps whichever gets mined and discards the other. The new transaction has a new hash, so the one your wallet showed first becomes a dead link. The same applies to Bitcoin's replace-by-fee (BIP 125): the replacement is a different transaction with a different txid.

Older Bitcoin transactions had a further problem, transaction malleability: a third party could tweak the signature encoding of an unconfirmed transaction and give it a different txid without changing where the money went. Segregated Witness (BIP 141, active since 2017) moved signatures out of the data the txid covers, which removed the problem for transactions that spend SegWit outputs. If your wallet uses addresses starting with bc1, this does not affect you.

9. Is it safe to share a transaction hash?

Yes. The hash contains no keys, no password and nothing that lets anyone move your funds. Anyone who has it can see what the explorer shows: the addresses involved, the amount and the time. That information is public already, because the blockchain is public; the hash only makes it easy to find.

The one privacy point: giving someone the hash of a payment tells them which address is yours, and from there every other transaction on that address. If that matters, use a fresh receiving address for each payment, which most Bitcoin wallets do by default.

10. How to get the hash in code

If your application sends transactions, keep the hash the broadcast call returns: it is the key for status checks, support tickets and reconciliation. With the ChainGate SDK the same lines work on Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash and any EVM network:

import { ChainGate, importWallet } from 'chaingate';

const cg = new ChainGate({ apiKey: process.env.CHAINGATE_API_KEY });
const wallet = importWallet({ phrase: process.env.MNEMONIC });
const eth = cg.connect(cg.networks.ethereum, wallet);

const tx = await eth.transfer(cg.networks.ethereum.amount('0.01'), '0x...');
tx.setFee(tx.recommendedFees().normal);

const sent = await tx.signAndBroadcast();
console.log(sent.transactionId); // 0x... on EVM chains, 64 hex chars on Bitcoin

sent.onConfirmed((details) => {
  console.log('mined in block', details.blockHeight, details.transactionId);
});

The tutorial on sending crypto in JavaScript covers wallets, fees and error handling, and the transfer documentation lists every field on the broadcast result, including the onConfirmed() callback used above.

11. Where to go from here

You can now read a hash the way an explorer does: which chain, which transaction, and whether it is final. To understand the fee line on that explorer page, read what gas fees are on Ethereum and how Bitcoin fees work, and to see what sending costs right now on each network, open the gas tracker. If you want broadcasting, confirmation callbacks and transaction IDs handled across Bitcoin and EVM chains from one TypeScript library, ChainGate does that.

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