Why doesn't the Metamask wallet reflect internal transactions in its ledger, but does in its summed balance?

Question

Metamask wallet has no problem showing on its ledger (inflow and outflow amounts) normal transactions that appear on Etherscan.io for that wallet address. But Metamask fails to reflect the inflows due to Internal Transactions, which appear on a separate tab for the wallet on Etherscan.

Yet, Metamask sums up the true balance fine, although this sum obviously won't correspond with Metamask's apparent ledger, which would be missing the internal transactions accurately shown on Etherscan.

Why is this, and is there a computational work-around?

Answer 1

I think probably because internal transactions aren't actually transactions.

(They are more correctly known as messages. See: What is the difference between transaction and message?)

So they are effectively side-effects of transactions happening. Further, internal transactions aren't logged in the blockchain like transactions are, so it's difficult to listen for them, which is why Metamask currently can't show them.

The way Etherscan is able to listen for them is because they run their own instrumented version of the EVM, and can see exactly what's happening at a state level.