Account Nonce

An account nonce is a counter attached to an account on networks such as Ethereum that records how many transactions that account has already sent. Each new transaction must carry the next number in the sequence, which fixes the order in which an account's transactions execute and prevents the same signed transaction being replayed. If a transaction with a lower nonce is stuck pending, everything behind it waits, which is why wallets offer speed up and cancel functions that rebroadcast the same nonce with a higher fee. Block explorers show the nonce on every transaction, so it is a useful field when diagnosing a stuck queue. The word nonce also names an unrelated value in proof-of-work mining, so context matters.