• A post/author on twitter shared their finding which claims Terra's failed transactions have been on the rise lately.
• Image Attached:

Bounty Brief:

• The following analysis will verify the claims made/data presented and also investigate further into the causes and their possible solutions/mitigations.

• The analysis checks out.
• So let's dig further into what could be the causes for these failures.

Why are the transactions failing?

Fig. 1

• We analyze the tx_status_msg field for clues on what caused the transaction failure.
• Since there can be a variety of unique errors, we are focusing on the top/highest 5 contributors to failures per day. This keeps the noise out of the chart.

Fig. 2

• Same as Fig. 1, just normalized to reflect daily contribution by error type.

Observations:

• It is clearly evident the leading cause of failures is the error type: execute wasm contract failed
• Followed by insufficient funds and out of gas

Fig. 3

• Does market volatility/LUNA prices have any correlation with increased transaction failures?

Observations:

• It does seem there's a correlation!
• Market Volatility is usually a time when the underlying chain is stress-tested, as users rush to manage their on-chain positions and activities.
• The crests and valleys in failure rate often coincide with the same in LUNA price-action 🤔

Remedying/Reducing Failures:

Now that we know the most common failure reasons, let's go over some possible ways to reduce/curb them.

• execute wasm contract failed

  • As the name suggests these are caused due to interaction failures with smart contracts.
  • This could either be in the form of wrong input parameters/invalid requests or parameters that became outdated.
  • These would ideally not be impacting an average user. The impact would likely be noticeable to bot users/builders and other automators/tinkerers.
  • Perhaps worth investing further down this reason and narrowing it into various sub-error categories!

• Insufficient Funds / Out of Gas

  • These errors ought to be handled (to some extent) by the wallet UI/App UIs.
  • Most apps/wallets do not initiate a transaction if for some reason the balance entered for the action is insufficient/gas can't be payed.
  • This seems to be a case where it's again the scriptors/arbitragers running their bots with certain aspects left unchecked?

• It would make sense for TerraLabs to look into whether these failures are being experienced by average/normal users or developers and traders/automators running custom scripts and spamming incorrect code logic that leads to failures. If it's the latter, maybe better guidelines and documents/workshops would help alleviate and avoid some of the most common failures.