Insufficient funds when transferring ERC-20 token using web3

Question

I am trying to send an ERC-20 token on Mainnet using web3 v1.x and Infura. I get the error in the title while executing this code.

I have a balance of about 0.14 ETH

var provider = new HDWalletProvider(config.mnemonic, "https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/" + config.infuraKey);

const web3 = new Web3(provider);

const tokenAbi = config.abi;
let tokenContract = new web3.eth.Contract(tokenAbi, contractAddress);


let data = tokenContract.methods.transfer(tAddr, tAmountInWei).encodeABI();
const tx = {
   from: myAddress,
   to: contractAddress,
   gas: web3.utils.toHex(400000),
   gasPrice: web3.utils.toHex(25000000000),
   value: "0x0",
   data: data
};


let eTx = await web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction(tx, tx.from, (err, signedTx) => {
    if (err) {
       console.error(err);
       return err;
    } else {
       console.log('SignedTx: ', signedTx);
       return web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(signedTx.rawTransaction, (err, res) => {
          if (err) {
             console.error(err);
          } else {
             console.log(res);
             count++;
          }
       });
    }
});

My error below:

Error: insufficient funds for gas * price + value
    at /Users/****/****/node_modules/truffle-hdwallet-provider/dist/index.js:15:632675
    at t.i.onreadystatechange (/Users/****/*****/node_modules/truffle-hdwallet-provider/dist/index.js:15:748948)
    at t.e.dispatchEvent (/Users/*****/*****/node_modules/truffle-hdwallet-provider/dist/index.js:1:142373)
    at t._setReadyState (/Users/*****/*****/node_modules/truffle-hdwallet-provider/dist/index.js:15:753708)
    at t._onHttpResponseEnd (/Users/*****/*****/node_modules/truffle-hdwallet-provider/dist/index.js:15:756793)
    at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (/Users/*****/*****/node_modules/truffle-hdwallet-provider/dist/index.js:15:756051)
    at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:203:15)
    at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:1129:12)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:63:19)

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 29 '19 at 06:53

The maximum gas fees that is allocated for your transaction is gas * gasPrice in your case, it's 25 Gwei (giga-wei, or 10^9 wei, or 10^-9 ETH) times 400,000 gas limit,

or 10,000,000 (10^6) Gwei.

10^6 * 10^-9 = 0.001 ETH

so your wallet balance should be sufficient.

I would double-check two things:

call estimateGas to double-check how much gas web3 thinks is required to mine the tx, with information from this post. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/515/4670
call web3.eth.getBalance to make sure you are using the address that you think you are https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API#example-35

Good luck!

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 30 '19 at 03:04

I found this way to work.

tokenContract.methods.transfer(tAddr, tAmountInWei).send({
         from: myAddress,
         gas: web3.utils.toHex(40000),
         gasPrice: web3.utils.toHex(25000000000),
         value: "0x0"
}).on('transactionHash', (hash) => {
    console.log(`txHash: ${hash}`);
});

Insufficient funds when transferring ERC-20 token using web3

2 Answers2