[Ethers.js x Celo] What issues are you facing with Ethers.js?

[arthurgousset]

👉 TLDR: Please share/upvote issues you have with Ethers.js on Celo. 👈

Hi all, @aaronmgdr is investigating issues you face with Ethers.js.

To help you, we'd like learn about your issues and to get as much context as possible.

Here are some problems on our radar:

1. re gas estimation (missing gasLimit field in RPC API) has been fixed by @piersy in this PR: Improve RPC API compatibility for Ethers.js celo-blockchain#1957
2. re paying gas with custom tokens (missing feeCurrency support in Ethers.js). This is on @aaronmgdr's radar 📡

Here is some feedback we heard:

For me (as a developer), the only things I care about is to connect/disconnect to a wallet, get the user address, signer and provider (so I know if on the wrong network) and be able to set fee currency. [...] I don't want anything else other than a generic wallet connector and be able to set fee transactions. @celo/connect is working well for setting fees.

Our ask: 👉 Please share/upvote issues you have with Ethers.js on Celo. 👈

[aaronmgdr]

Also would like to know if the celo-ethers-wrapper has been tried by people and if so what limitations have come up. I suppose the main one is that it so far only implements the Wallet Signer which requires having a private key.

[d-mooers]

A very early version of Centro used celo-ethers-wrapper. Back then I think the main issue was getting wallet connection working correctly with Valora (spurred the creation of valora-ethers) as contract kit and the valora connection lib used web3js.

I havent revisited celo-ethers-wrapper since then, but might now

[vibern0]

A few days ago I was watching Richard during Devcon talking about ethers v6. There will be network plugins https://youtu.be/qli5SoAKC1s?t=757 If I understood correctly how it works, it might be a good chance to build a plugin and drop this wrapper.
And answering the question, I never used. What I use thought is a combination of react-celo, @celo/connect, and ethers, just so I handle everything with ethers but submit the transaction with @celo/connect so I can set fee currency, using react-celo provider.

[d-mooers]

From Node's side, the biggest blocker/request is really just being able to pay gas with a custom token and correctly estimate gas for the custom gas token. Besides this we have not encountered many issues with ethers on Celo.

[arthurgousset]

Thanks for sharing!

[kosecki123]

1. re gas estimation (missing gasLimit field in RPC API) has been fixed by @piersy in this PR: Improve RPC API compatibility for Ethers.js celo-blockchain#1957

Regarding this point, does this has to be deployed by nodes providers?

Currently using vanilla JsonRpcProvider from ethers 5.7.1 with forno alfajores are giving me

{
  reason: 'invalid BigNumber value',
  code: 'INVALID_ARGUMENT',
  argument: 'value',
  value: undefined,
  checkKey: 'gasLimit',
  checkValue: undefined
}

error

[kosecki123]

yes the release it is part of is still being tested. so its not out yet. and once its out full node providers will need to run it

OK, clear. I assume to will fix the issue of using vanilla ethers provider with Celo nodes.

[aaronmgdr]

yes the release it is part of is still being tested. so its not out yet. and once its out full node providers will need to run it

OK, clear. I assume to will fix the issue of using vanilla ethers provider with Celo nodes.

That's right.

[kosecki123]

That's right.

And, obvious follow up q, wen?

[aaronmgdr]

I believe the eta is about a month right now.

@piersy since he wrote the thing

[arthurgousset]

Here is what @piersy shared 2 weeks ago:

The fix is in this release https://github.com/celo-org/celo-blockchain/releases/tag/v1.7.0-beta.1 but that is a beta that is currently undergoing testing on the baklava network, once done it will be promoted to alfajores and finally to mainnet. The schedule used for that is laid out here but we have encountered a problem with baklava so the process is currently stalled while we look into that.

[aaronmgdr]

BTW with the release of 1.7.0 aka the Flan hardfork November 9, 2022 gasLimit is included in RPC blocks

[aaronmgdr]

Here is doc with my research / work on fee currencies. Please write here if you see any blindspots

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tQXBq8Hr2YuKWNXctmeCPzKvatpCBRPGSrAUtqttfog/edit?usp=sharing

[arthurgousset]

Sharing a discussion going on in the Etherjs repo re custom transaction types:

• Support for EIP-2718 transaction envelope types beyond 1 and 2 ethers-io/ethers.js#3747

[amytsang]

Saw the following error message when connecting to ethersjs v6.3.0 using the RPC at https://forno.celo.org

[karlb]

Celo does not include a difficulty value for blocks at the moment, as it is not relevant to our consensus. However, to increase the compatibility with Ethereum, there is a CIP draft to add this and other fields to the block header with constant values. See celo-org/celo-proposals#370

Without looking into the Ethers code, I think the CIP might resolve this specific issue.

[arthurgousset]

Hi @amytsang, briefly following up here:

TLDR:

• we deployed a fix to the Forno RPC you are using at https://forno.celo.org/
• you should not see the error above anymore. Could you confirm that's the case?

More context:

• the quick fix adds a difficulty value to the response of the JSON-RPC API in Forno (see this PR)
• Why? As @karlb mentioned, Celo block headers don't currently include a difficulty value. There is a proposal to add them back in the next hardfork, but in the mean time we artificially added them back in the response from the JSON-RPC API in Forno.
• This means that the above request will not throw an error when using the Forno RPC, but might still throw an error in other RPC providers until the next hardfork

For future reference, the code snippet that caused this error was:

import { ethers } from "ethers";

(async () => {
    const provider = new ethers.JsonRpcProvider("https://forno.celo.org");
    const feeData = await provider.getFeeData();  // <--------- BUG
})();

[amytsang]

Thank you, confirmed that's resolved!