Contract revert reasons can mimic node errors

[fvictorio]

Ethers Version

5.6.4

Search Terms

insufficient funds, insufficient funds for intrinsic transaction cost, error message

Describe the Problem

Given a contract with a require like this one:

require(false, "Insufficient funds")

Ethers will (wrongly) say that the error was "Error: insufficient funds for intrinsic transaction cost"

I guess there's some pattern matching going on with the returned error message.

This happens even with the hardhat network when a correct data is returned with the encoded error string.

Code Snippet

No response

Contract ABI

No response

Errors

No response

Environment

No response

Environment (Other)

No response

[ricmoo]

Thanks! I’ll look into this asap.

[ricmoo]

This has been fixed in 5.6.6. Try it out and let me know if you still have any issues.

Thanks! :)

[fvictorio]

I think this is working correctly when the gas is estimated, but the same problem shows up if you set a specific gas limit in the overrides 😢

[ricmoo]

I thought I tried that too? I’ll test it out again shortly.

[ricmoo]

I just tried out all combinations of "view" vs. "send" and "with" vs "without" a gasLimit, and all returned the appropriate error (CALL_EXCEPTION or UNPREDICTABLE_GAS_LIMIT, depending); none returned the mimicked INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS error.

Can you provide an example?

[fvictorio]

It happens when using Hardhat's node, but it does not happen with geth --dev. I don't know why.

One difference I noticed is that, when using geth, I have to do:

const tx = await contract.f({ gasLimit: 1_000_000 }) // f reverts with "Insufficient funds" as its revert reason
await tx.wait()

But when using Hardhat's node, the transaction reverts immediately (before reaching tx.wait).

I should clarify that, while I'm using Hardhat's node, I'm running a script with plain ethers (no hardhat-ethers involved).

Does that help? I think it's just a matter of doing the tests you did but using Hardhat's node, but here's the script I used just in case:

const ethers = require("ethers");

async function main() {
  const provider = new ethers.providers.JsonRpcProvider("http://localhost:8545")
  // private key of hardhat's second default account
  const signer = new ethers.Wallet("0x59c6995e998f97a5a0044966f0945389dc9e86dae88c7a8412f4603b6b78690d", provider)
  // address where I deployed the Foo contract, see below
  const contract = new ethers.Contract("0x8464135c8F25Da09e49BC8782676a84730C318bC", ['function f() public'], signer)

  const tx = await contract.f({ gasLimit: 1_000_000 });

  await tx.wait()
}

main()
  .then(() => process.exit(0))
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error);
    process.exit(1);
  });

and the contract:

//SPDX-License-Identifier: Unlicense
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;

contract Foo {
  function f() public {
    require(false, "Insufficient funds");
  }
}

[se3000]

Just ran into this. The code has been unchanged for years. The tests have gone through some tooling changes over the years, but are mostly unchanged. Started failing when we bumped to the latest version of hardhat.

AssertionError: Expected transaction to be reverted with insufficient funds for payment, but other exception was thrown: Error: insufficient funds for intrinsic transaction cost [ See: https://links.ethers.org/v5-errors-INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS ] (error={"stackTrace":[{"type":4,"sourceReference":{"function":"updateFutureRounds","contract":"FluxAggregator","sourceName":"src/v0.6/FluxAggregator.sol","sourceContent":"...","line":263,"range":[9007,9108]},"message":{"value":{"type":"Buffer","data":[8,195,121,160,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,32,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,105,110,115,117,102,102,105,99,105,101,110,116,32,102,117,110,100,115,32,102,111,114,32,112,97,121,109,101,110,116,0,0]},"_selector":"08c379a0"},"isInvalidOpcodeError":false}],"data":"0x08c379a00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000020000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001e696e73756666696369656e742066756e647320666f72207061796d656e740000","transactionHash":"0x9bfe504c7424e176106affd152054a953f18c187db02f0da032c8fca4666a7e8"}, method="sendTransaction", transaction=undefined, code=INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS, version=providers/5.6.8)

[ricmoo]

Closing older issues. But if this is still happening in v6, please re-open or start a new issue.

Thanks! :)