{
  "id": 14166998,
  "title": "I decoded every failed transaction in 40 Ethereum blocks and 150 Base blocks. Here is why they fail.",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/13/i-decoded-every-failed-transaction-in-40-ethereum-blocks-and-150-base",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-13T09:42:39.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/lowkeybuilds/i-decoded-every-failed-transaction-in-40-ethereum-blocks-and-150-base-blocks-here-is-why-they-fail-4e2f"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "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.",
  "summary": "\"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…",
  "key_points": [
    "3.6% of Ethereum transactions failed due to 401 errors",
    "50.1% of Ethereum failures were caused by high gas limits in EIP-7702 accounts",
    "Base's failure rate was 2.5 times higher than Ethereum's"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}