Miao - EVM Transaction Decoder
Recently, I found myself increasingly reliant on (free) 3rd party tools such as ethtx.info to decode and debug failed mainnet transactions. This made me felt quite uneasy as:
- I don't know who made it
- I did not know how they did it
- What do I do if the service is down when I desperately need it?
- No one to complain….
And so, I decided to write one myself. But I also had a couple of requirements:
- Supports external data fetching
- So we can retrieve our Ethereum state from any mainstream providers such as cloudflare / infura.
- Forbids external data processing
- I wanted the processing to be done in-house and not be at the mercy of some analytics platform.
Learning from existing projects
tx2uml
One of the projects that kept popping up on my radar was tx2uml by Nick Addison.
It initially seemed like the perfect fit, but unfortunately digging deeper, the readme states that it was at the mercy of yet another API - alethio. And so, I jumped ship.
HEVM
Fortunately one of my favorite tooling framework dapp.tools already has built in tracing - it was also doing that data processing in house!
Only problem was that the tracing output didn't convey a lot of information unless it was used against a project that uses dapp.tools behind the scenes. This was because it was missing the ABIs / function signatures of the external contracts it was interacting with.
But this served as a good basis point to work off from.
Introducing Miao
Miao, is a lightweight (And by lightweight, I mean that a full node is not required to use it, e.g. parity trace) transaction decoder that consists of three parts:
- ethtxd, tx receiver and decoding service. (Thanks hevm)
- miao-backend, service that retrieve ABIs and function signatures from etherscan and 4byte to make better sense of the decoded data from ethtxd
- miao-frontend, web UI to interact interact with / visualize the decoded transaction
What does Miao mean?
Miao, when pronounced in Chinese can be interpreted as 描 or 喵.
- 描 as in “describe” (describe the transactions)
- 喵 as in “meow” (cat)
This is a great time to remind everyone that my cat has an instagram.
Usage
Using miao is fairly easy, just clone the repository and run docker-compose up
git clone git@github.com:kendricktan/miao.git
cd miao
docker-compose up
A localhost ganache-cli will also be spawned for your convinence.
Example
Conclusion
Transaction traces very good.