I decoded every failed transaction in 40 Ethereum blocks and 150 Base blocks. Here is why they fail.
"Transaction failed" on a block explorer tells you almost nothing. "Fail with error 'execution reverted'" tells you less. So I took every failed transaction from a recent run of blocks on Ethereum mainnet and on Base, replayed each one against the state of the previous block, decoded the revert data, and counted. Disclosure: I built the decoder used here, Pitcrew . Its free web version is linked…
An analysis of failed transactions in 40 Ethereum blocks and 150 Base blocks reveals significant patterns. On Ethereum, 401 transactions out of 30,809 failed, with 3.6% of them failing due to a 401 error. The majority of these failures (50.1%) were caused by sending 21,000 gas to EIP-7702 accounts, which require higher gas limits.
Another 27.4% of failures occurred when a state change earlier in the same block altered the transaction outcome. Slippage and insufficient balance were less common, accounting for 8.7% and 6.5% of failures, respectively. On Base, the failure rate was 2.5 times higher at 2,745 out of 52,544 transactions, with 58.9% of failures resulting from state changes during the same block.
Custom error messages and require() messages accounted for 14.4% and 8.1% of failures, while balance issues made up 2.8%. Base's failures were primarily driven by bots, with private bot contracts causing many of the failures. The most frequent human-facing errors were slippage and allowance issues. The analysis highlights the importance of estimating gas amounts for ETH transfers and monitoring for state changes in the same block.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
