ETH Batch Sending

Simple tool to create batch-transactions to send ETH (not ERC20) on the Ethereum network to multiple destinations in a single transaction.

Live deployed at: https://ethbatchsend.zweng.at/

Demo video

EthBatchSend-demo-video.mp4

Transaction from demo video: https://ropsten.etherscan.io/tx/0x0ea60a0caed8034b492e81761859b17d2469bf138b972b4c937ccbb922d23787

Features

• allows to use less than 21000 gas per receiver, when sending ETH to 4 addresses or more
• validates addresses before sending
• checks if addresses fulfill all needed state-requirements (and does not allow to send if these are not fulfilled).

Limitations

• MetaMask must be installed in the browser
• It's only cheaper than single transactions when sending to 4 or more destinations at once
• It only supports EAOs (external owned accounts, aka "private key addresses"), NO SmartContracts!
• The destination addresses must have been used before on chain (must have had some transaction in the past or some balance --> see below for technical details about this)

Ethereum technical details

The tool simply creates a "contract deployment" transaction (i.e. transaction where to: is null). The data field ist constructed with Ethereum EVM OP-Codes which send ETH to all the destinations.

In essence it just uses one OP-Code CALL per destination to send the ETH and at the end one final OP-Code SELFDESTRUCT to collect and refund the remaining ETH to the sender and also to benefit from the gas refund (each SELFDESTRUCT OP-Code reduces the gas-counter of a transaction by 24000).

(NOTE: With the "London" hardfork EIP-3529: Reduction in refunds will go live, which will remove the 24000 gas refund for SELFDESTRUCT. See: https://github.com/ethereum/eth1.0-specs/blob/master/network-upgrades/mainnet-upgrades/london.md).

All the remaining OP-Codes are just PUSH or DUP OP-Codes to set up the values on the stack which are expected by CALL and SELFDESTRUCT.

Per destination address

The code in data per destination address looks like this (xxx...xxx stands for the address):

60 00  80 80 80   68 0000abcdef12345678  73 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 82 f1

This is in detail:

• 60 00 = PUSH1 00: --> push 0x00 onto the stack
• 80 = DUP1: --> duplicate the last value on stack (the 0x00 from above)
• 80 = DUP1: --> duplicate the last value on stack (the 0x00 from above)
• 80 = DUP1: --> duplicate the last value on stack (the 0x00 from above)
• 68 0000abcdef12345678 = PUSH9 xxxxxxx: --> push a 9-byte long value to the stack, which will be the amount to send (in wei, as a hexadecimal number, so the 0000abcdef12345678 in this example represent 0.048358647703819896 ETH to be sent)
• 73 xxxx…xxxxx = PUSH20 xxx…xxxx: --> push a 20-byte long value to the stack, which will be the destination address
• 82 = DUP3 --> duplicate the 3rd value (copy another 0x00 from the ones we have pushed/dup'ed above)

At this point the EVM stack looks like this (compare with arguments of OP-Code CALL:

00         // "gas": if we set 0, the default minimum if 2300 will be used, is ok as we only send to addresses (no contracts)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    // "addr": destination 
0000abcdef12345678         // "value" wei to send with this call
00                         // "argsOffset": no arguments
00                         // "argsLength": no arguments
00                         // "retOffset": no return data expected
00                         // "retLength": no return data expected

• And then one final OP-Code: f1 --> CALL: This will execute this transfer and send the ETH to this address (and will also place one element on the stack). For efficiency reason we ignore the returned success element and do neither check it, nor POP it from the stack.

All of this will be added per destination address!

Collect remaining ETH at the end:

After the last destination the following code is added:

73  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  ff

This is in detail:

• 73 xxxx…xxxxx = PUSH20 xxx…xxxx: --> push a 20-byte long value to the stack, which will be the address where the remaing funds of the transaction should be sent to.
• ff = SELFDESTRUCT: Selfdestruct will send all remaining funds to the last address on the stack (which we pushed there in the step before) and self-destructs the contract, which will reduce the transaction's gas counter again by 24000.

Note about CALL

When using CALL to send ETH there is one important detail: if the receiver account of CALL does not exist yet (is a "new" account) then there will be extra gascosts of 25000 gas (see G_newaccount in Appendix G in the Yellow paper)!

"New account" in this context means, that the account does not exist in the Ethereum state trie yet. So any address which never had sent any transaction (nonce still 0) or has never had any balance does not exist in the state trie yet, and will be therefore much more expensive to send to.

--> This is the rationale why this tool checks before sending if all destination addresses have been used before (otherwise sending in batch would be more expensive than a single transaction).

Examples:

• Transaction on Ropsten testnet to 30 destinations at once: Tx on Etherscan
• Transaction on Ropsten testnet to 150 destinations at once: Tx on Etherscan

Useful tools:

You can look up the example transactions above and copy the content of the Input data field and disassemble them with a tool like https://etherscan.io/opcode-tool.

Development setup

This project was built with VueJS 3.

npm install

Compiles and hot-reloads for development

npm run serve

Compiles and minifies for production

npm run build

Lints and fixes files

npm run lint