Sending eth to contract fallback fails with default gas

[miguelmota]

MetaMask is setting the gas limit of 21000 by default for eth sends even if it's to a contract which will always fail. An improvement would be to add additional gas padding if the the receiving address is a contract.

Example failed tx

[jennypollack]

+1
I started noticing this recently on gnosis branch but it doesn't happen every time
if we detect a contract address that is a valid recipient we should do an estimate_gas call instead of using the gas defaults set in the frontend and the gasLimitSpecified flag

[rstormsf]

@danfinlay
100% agree. Metamask could make 1 extra call to see if it's an account or contract

const bytecode = await web3.eth.getCode('REGULAR_ADDRESS')
console.log(bytecode) // returns 0x for regular accounts

or always try to call estimate_gas regardless if it's contract or not
contracts with fallbacks needs a bit more gas than 21000

[danfinlay]

Yeah that's what I thought we did, so this is definitely a bug in the meanwhile. Avoiding estimate_gas when not a contract was one strategy for improving time to estimate gas, which I guess is a little surprising, since you'd think any node would be quick to estimate 21000 when it was not a contract and a simple ether send.

[danfinlay]

Oh man, this bug is so bad now blog posts are talking about how to educate users around it. We need this fixed soon. This must have been introduced recently, there's no way this has been sitting around.
https://medium.com/wearekickback/integrating-a-contract-based-wallet-into-your-dapp-1721c1a1148b

[danfinlay]

Here’s the line that claims to be doing this. Does look like a regression.
https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/blob/develop/app/scripts/controllers/transactions/tx-gas-utils.js

[robertmagier]

It seems that issues is back in version 7.7.4