The Day I Realized My Smart Contract Was the Bug
My journey from a “perfect” on-chain architecture to a simple, contract-less solution that actually worked — all in a single coding session.
Like many developers, I’ve been captivated by the promise of Web3. The idea of user-owned data, decentralized applications, and permissionless value transfer is a powerful vision of the internet’s future. To make it real for myself, I set out with a simple, practical goal: build a dApp to token-gate access to a tool I had already created — a powerful, proprietary AI Financial Analyzer.
The concept was a perfect portfolio piece: use a crypto payment to unlock a valuable digital service. A user would pay a small fee in AVAX, and in return, they’d get access to the AI.
On paper, the plan was flawless.
The “Perfect” On-Chain Architecture
The architecture seemed self-evident. Web3 payments mean smart contracts, right? I mapped out the whole system with the logical purity of a textbook example.
- A Solidity Smart Contract: I’d write a simple, secure contract on the Avalanche network. It would have a single
payablefunction that accepted 0.001 AVAX. - A Dependency-Free Frontend: The UI would be built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using direct
window.ethereumcalls to interact with the blockchain. Clean, lightweight, and universal. - The “Pay-to-Reveal” Flow: A user would connect their wallet, send the 0.001 AVAX to the smart contract, and upon a successful transaction, the dApp would reveal the embedded AI analyzer.
I meticulously wrote the contract, refined it with security best practices like Reentrancy Guards, and deployed it to the Fuji Testnet. I built the clean, dark-mode frontend. It was time to test.
I connected my wallet, clicked the button, confirmed in MetaMask, and… Transaction Failed.
A Wall of Red: When “Execution Reverted” Becomes Your Enemy
On the Snowtrace block explorer, the error was stark and unhelpful: Warning! Error encountered during contract execution [execution reverted].
For any developer who has worked with smart contracts, this is a familiar and frustrating message. It’s the blockchain’s equivalent of a shrug. Something went wrong inside the black box of the EVM, and it’s not telling you what.
So began an intense debugging session.
My first thought was that the data I was sending to the contract was the problem. My function initially expected a text string, analyze(string). Manually encoding this in JavaScript without a library like Ethers.js is notoriously tricky. Maybe I had a bug in my hex padding?
Attempt #1: I rewrote the encoding logic multiple times. Failed.
\ Attempt #2: I simplified the contract. I removed the string argument entirely, creating a new function, unlockAccess(), that took no arguments. The transaction data would be a simple, static 4-byte function signature. This had to work. I redeployed the contract, updated the frontend. Failed.
Attempt #3: Maybe it was the require statement checking the payment amount? I’d heard of subtle on-chain precision issues causing msg.value to be off. I redeployed the contract again, this time with the check completely removed. All it did was accept a payment. Failed. Again.
The Epiphany: I Was Solving the Wrong Problem
After a few hours deep in a flow state, hitting roadblock after roadblock, I finally took a step back. I had been trying to force a square peg into a round hole, focusing entirely on fixing the smart contract interaction. But the contract wasn’t the goal; it was just a tool.
The real goal was simple: prove a user paid 0.001 AVAX to unlock a service.
I realized the smart contract wasn’t a feature — it was a liability. It was an unnecessary, complex, and fragile point of failure. The most robust, simple, and guaranteed-to-succeed transaction on any blockchain isn’t a contract interaction. It’s a direct, peer-to-peer transfer.
Simplicity as the Solution
The final pivot was obvious in hindsight. I threw out the smart contract entirely.
The new plan was radically simpler:
- The user connects their wallet.
- They click a button to send 0.001 AVAX directly to my public wallet address.
- The frontend waits for that simple transfer to be confirmed, and then unlocks the app.
I replaced the contract address with my own, stripped out the complex data encoding, and left only the simple value transfer parameters. I held my breath and clicked the button one last time.
Transaction Successful.
The app unlocked. The embedded AI analyzer appeared. It worked.
The final product still perfectly demonstrates the core principle of a Web3-powered service. It’s a dApp, it uses crypto, and it grants access based on a successful on-chain payment. But by removing the unnecessary layer of complexity, it became something far more valuable: it became reliable.
My journey to build this dApp taught me a crucial lesson. In a space so full of complex and revolutionary technology, sometimes the most elegant solution is the one that uses the least of it. Before you build a complex on-chain system, first ask yourself: can this be done with a simple transfer?
If you would like to see my Web3 projects and use them (they are on the Avalanche Fuji Testnet so free to test and use) please visit my website:
https://www.damiangriggs.com
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