Introduction

On March 17th, Alpha DeFi posted this tweet with the following chart:

This chart shows the total number of transactions per month, the number of failed transactions and the percentage of all transactions that have failed. The chart seems to suggest that the percentage of failed transactions has been on the rise. In this dashboard, we will first try to validate this chart by recreating it using Flipside data. If this claim seems valid, we will try to find the cause of this increase in failed transaction and provide recommendations to mitigate it.

Methodology

To recreate this chart above, the terra.transactions table was used. This table contains a column called tx_status which was used to determine if a transaction was successful or not. The block_timestamp of the transaction was truncated by month and the number of the unique transactions that were successful or not were counted.

In order to find the reason for a transaction to fail, the tx_status_msg column was used. Then we counted the number of times each failure message occurred per day to get an idea of which error caused most error messages to fail.

Results

As can be seen, we were able to almost exactly replicate the chart in the tweet. This means that the claim that the percentage of failed transactions is indeed rising.

Next, we'll look at the most common reasons for transactions to fail.

From this chart, we can see that the message "failed to execute" was by far the most common error in recent months. We can also see that this error message started being dominant in October 2021. This is interesting as the Columbus-5 upgrade was conducted at the end of September. Therefore, it could be that some bug in the Columbus-5 upgrade caused more transactions to fail.

Also interesting, the number of failed transactions due to "out of gas" has also been increasing in the last few months. This could be an indicator for new users entering the ecosystem. New users are more likely to make the mistake of not leaving some funds for gas. Could be far-fetfetched, but could be a real reason why the "out of gas" error is occurring more often.

Key findings

• The claim by AlphaDeFi about rising transaction failure seems to be correct.
• Since Col-5, the percentage of failed transactions has been rising.
• The "Failed to execute" error has been the dominant error since Col-5.
• Because "Failed to execute" is quite a general error, more analysis is needed to find ways to mitigate this error.