Cannot interact with deployed contract - negative hex string

Question

I am working on several contracts and I can deploy and test fine on hardhat-network. However whenever I switch to Ganache or Rinkeby I get the following behaviour:

• The contract deploys fine
• Whenever I try to access one of the contract methods I get the following error:

Error: invalid hex string (argument="value", value="-0x0e8800", code=INVALID_ARGUMENT, version=bytes/5.5.0)
    at Logger.makeError (/home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/logger/src.ts/index.ts:225:28)
    at Logger.throwError (/home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/logger/src.ts/index.ts:237:20)
    at Logger.throwArgumentError (/home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/logger/src.ts/index.ts:241:21)
    at hexStripZeros (/home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/bytes/src.ts/index.ts:304:16)
    at hexValue (/home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/bytes/src.ts/index.ts:295:21)
    at /home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/providers/src.ts/json-rpc-provider.ts:646:35
    at Array.forEach (<anonymous>)
    at Function.JsonRpcProvider.hexlifyTransaction (/home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/providers/src.ts/json-rpc-provider.ts:644:100)
    at /home/augustin/tokenart/tokenart-contracts/node_modules/@ethersproject/providers/src.ts/json-rpc-provider.ts:210:60 {
  reason: 'invalid hex string',
  code: 'INVALID_ARGUMENT',
  argument: 'value',
  value: '-0x0e8800'
}

I didn't use to get this error so it is really baffling to me. It started around last week with seemingly no changes to my development environment.

Here's the code:

    const FirstContract = await ethers.getContractFactory("FirstContract");
    const firstContract = await FirstContract.deploy();
    console.log("Contract deployed to:", firstContract.address);
    
    const SecondContract = await ethers.getContractFactory("SecondContract");
    const secondContract = await SecondContract.deploy();
    console.log("Contract deployed to: ", secondContract.address) ;

    console.log(await firstContract.whitelistProxy(secondContract.address));

Im am on WSL Ubuntu 20.4 and here's my package:

{
  "devDependencies": {
    "@nomiclabs/hardhat-ethers": "^2.0.4",
    "@nomiclabs/hardhat-waffle": "^2.0.1",
    "chai": "^4.3.4",
    "ethereum-waffle": "^3.4.0",
    "ethers": "^5.5.3",
    "hardhat": "^2.8.2"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "@openzeppelin/contracts": "^4.4.2"
  }
}

Answer 1

try to add below code after .deploy() call:

await contract.deployed();

for example:

const FirstContract = await ethers.getContractFactory("FirstContract");
const firstContract = await FirstContract.deploy();
await firstContract.deployed();
console.log("Contract deployed to:", firstContract.address);

OR change your testing network and use Goerli or Sepolia, because the Rinkeby testnet will be deprecated soon

please vote me up if it's useful :)