Gas issue on sendRawTransaction on the rinkeby network

Question

I'm facing a gas issue on rinkeby network on sendRawTransaction.

Tested with various gas value to experiment and getting either insufficient funds for gas * price + value or exceeds block gas limit.

Some more info: Gas Estimate: 32872 Balance: 1100000 Gwei gas: 87200

Any suggestions or anybody faced similar issue?

My code here: https://gist.github.com/anistark/2daf9295a4d5a03cb405ff5a47924b32

Answer 1

From your code, you are checking the balance of an address and creating a new private key to sign the raw transaction.

// Original balance

let existingBalance = web3.fromWei(web3.eth.getBalance(accountAddress), balanceUnit).toString();
console.log('existingBalance:', existingBalance, balanceUnit);


// New account

let seedPhrase = lightwallet.keystore.generateRandomSeed();

lightwallet.keystore.createVault({
    password: accountKey,
    seedPhrase: seedPhrase,
    hdPathString: "m/0'/0'/0'"
}, function (err, ks) {
    ks.keyFromPassword(accountKey, function (err, pwDerivedKey) {
        ...

        // Sign with new private key

        var tx = new Tx(rawTx);
        var privateKey = new Buffer(pwDerivedKey, 'hex')
        tx.sign(privateKey);

The new private key is unrelated to the original address. And it will have zero balance unless funded explicitely.

Answer 2

Based on the info you mentioned:

Transaction gas limit : 87 200 gas units
Account balance: 1 100 000 wei

The Rinkeby network has the following properties

Gas Price: 1 000 000 wei (1 gwei)
Block gas limit: 7 129 048 gas units

It means for this particular transaction, it will cost in transaction fees: gas * gasPrice = 87 200 * 1 000 000 = 87 200 000 000 wei

However you account only has 1 100 000 wei, That why you get insufficient funds for gas * price + value.

For the other exception exceeds block gas limit, I think you put a gas linit higher than the block gas limit of the RunkeBy network.