Try Quests to earn cryptoLet's Learn From Failures!
Who said we cannot learn from our failures?
Outline
As a part of an open analytics question on Flipside Crypto, we will analyze the failed transactions of Ethereum network. We have always looked at the successful transactions, their volume, time, executors and etc. Now it is time to look at the failed ones. Lets find out their hidden story!
> ## “It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.“ - Bill Gates
Note: Our analysis spans from August 7, 2015 to the current day, September 16, 2022.
Successful vs. Failed Transactions
For the first section, we are curious to know how many and what percentage of transactions failed on Ethereum?
The figure on the right gives the statistics. We can see that of 1.7 billion transactions that we have access to 1.659 billion or 96.9% succeeded and 53 million or 3.12% failed.
96.9% is a respectable statistic., but lets dig more!
Failures Through Time - Absolute
We analyze the failures through time using two method, absolute number of failed transactions, and the relative failed transactions compared to the successful transactions.
We can see that the number of failures were not stable and change dramatically through years.
The all time high of failures occurred on October 2017. Though the number of failed transactions lowered after 2018, it increased from mid 2020, and never was lower that 200,000 transactions per week since.
We also can see that both the total number of transactions and the number of failures reached an equilibrium since mid 2020.
Failures Through Time - Relative
Looking at the relative number of failures given all of the transactions, we can see that the even the relative number of failures were not stable through time. The failures on October of 2017 were truly an anomaly, when about 20% of the whole transactions on Ethereum failed.
Digging deeper, we found the on October 2017, Ethereum foundation issued a hard-fork on the network [1].
What Transactions Failed the Most?
Next, we are interested to know which functions/transaction types failed the most.
The figure on the left shows the top 100 transaction types. The top 10 transaction types with the most number failures are:
- Transfer
- Swap
- Claim
- Atomic Match
- Swap Exact Tokens For Tokens
- Swap Exact Tokens For ETH
- Mine
- Mint
- Swap ETH For Exact Tokens
- Multi Call
The Destination of Failed Transactions
Another question that we are curious about, is the destination of failed transactions. We want to know whether some destinations, which might be contract addresses account for specific number of failures. The following table shows the top 10 destination of failed transactions.
Our observations:
- We can see that Uniswap, OpenSea and HopProtocol, are among the contract addresses with the highest number of failed transactions. We suspect that these are in the top failed destinations, purely because of the high number of transactions they are handling.
- It is also worth mentioning the Bitcoinereum, is the only service that is not currently active. It was a project that tries to bring Bitcoin in the form of an ERC-20 token to Ethereum blockchain [2]. Bitcoinereum is now considered a failed project.
Wasted Gas
Next, we are checking out the cumulative gas used for failed transactions. One might think that a failed transactions does not need a gas fee but, since the miners or validators need to process and finalize all of the transactions (even the failed ones), gas fee should be paid [3].
Our observations:
-
The maximum volume of gas paid in a day for failed transactions was 3300 ETH and 9.16 million dollars, which both belong to May 1, 2022, a time when the market experienced a significant crash.
-
The total volume of gas paid for failed transactions were 291,000 ETH, which considering the price of ETH in the transaction day, equals 586 million dollars.
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The following graph shows the gas paid for failed transactions both in ETH and in dollar value. Not that we did not have access to ETH value before May 2020.
Our observations:
- We can see that in the beginning, the cumulative gas paid for failed transactions fluctuated a lot. It was almost stable from 2018 to 2020, but from May 2020, it suddenly increased by more than an order of magnitude (x10).
- Around the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, about 1 million dollars were paid for failed transactions.
- Since May 2022, an all time high for gases paid for failed transactions, both the gas in ETH and gas in USD decreased. But in the second section, Failures Through Time - Absolute, we have seen that the number of failed transactions did not drop significantly in this period. So either the gas price dropped or there was an increase in the network performance.
Seasonal Effect
Now lets see if there is a seasonal effect on failed transactions. By seasonal we mean whether there is a repeating behavior for the number of failed transactions from month to month and year to year.
Our observations:
- There was a spike on October 2017 (as mentioned in the beginning of this report).
- We can see that from August 2020, the number of failed transactions increased significantly and never went back to what is was before.
- 2021 was the year with the most number of transactions. Also the month with the highest number of failed transactions is also May 2022.
- Month-wise, we cannot see any particular pattern in the data, except that in the last two years the seconds half of the year was a crowded period for failed transactions.
Conclusions
In this report, we looked at the failed transactions on Ethereum blockchain. We have found that:
- About 3% of the total transactions on Ethereum failed over time.
- In this beginning of the Ethereum network operation, the number of failed transactions was very volatile, and experienced an all time high of about 20% failure per week on October 2017, while hard-fork was in progress.
- Transfer, Swap and Claim are the transactions that failed the most.
- Uniswap, OpenSea and HopProtocol are the top 3 destinations of the failed transactions.
- More that 586 million dollars were paid for failed transactions.
- August 2020 was a turning point for Ethereum’s, since the total number of failed transactions never went back to the amount that it was before.