How do I get the number of contract account creations in a block with Web3.js?

Question

I know that contract accounts are created by making transactions to zero-account(0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000), and by executing EVM opcode CREATE with contract code.

How do I get the number of contract account creations in a block with Web3.js?

Answer 1

While the above answer is sort of correct, it's not fool-proof. A transaction can be sent to '0x0', but it may fail to deploy the contract (because of out of gas issues for example). Without checking the error status of the transaction, you can't tell if the contract was created or not.

To be sure, you have to retrieve each transaction's receipt (eth_getTransactionReciept). If the receipt's contractAddress has a non-zero value, the contract was created at that address.

Answer 2

There is no function in Web3.js which would directly solve your problem, however you could write a little function to solve it.

In short you should use web3.eth.getBlock(arg), where arg is the number of the block you are interested in. Here, in the transactions field you will have a list of transactions (represented by their hashes) happened in that specific block. Then you need to iterate over this list of transaction hashes and check whether web3.eth.getTransaction(transactionHash).to is null or not. If it is null, then it means that the transaction was a contract creation.