Ethers still tries to estimate gas even when passing manual gasLimit

Describe the bug I’m trying to call a contract method with an unpredictable gas limit, however if I try to call it and pass the gasLimit manually I get get a “Error: cannot estimate gas; transaction may fail or may require manual gas limit” error.

Maybe I’m missing something but shouldn’t ethers skip estimating gas if it’s passed manually?

Reproduction steps You can test with the following contract in rinkeby:

const CONTRACT = "0x10539a06b047259f247f8c622430c22803821A00";
const ABI = [
  'function stakeOf(address _owner) public view returns (uint256[] memory)'
];

// using JsonRpcProvider as an example, but I've tried with metamask as well and same issue
const provider =new ethers.providers.JsonRpcProvider(
    "provider URL"
);
const signer = provider.getSigner();
const contract = new ethers.Contract(CONTRACT, ABI, signer);

contract.stakeOf("0x73257cE508dBB94Ff78C27381FddD42FB7266Ba4", {
  gasLimit: '50000000',
}),

Result

Error: cannot estimate gas; transaction may fail or may require manual gas limit (error={"name":"ProviderError","code":3,"_isProviderError":true,"data":"0x4e487b710000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000032"}, method="call", transaction={"from":"0x73257cE508dBB94Ff78C27381FddD42FB7266Ba4","gasLimit":{"type":"BigNumber","hex":"0x02faf080"},"to":"0x10539a06b047259f247f8c622430c22803821A00","data":"0x4262336000000000000000000000000073257ce508dbb94ff78c27381fddd42fb7266ba4","accessList":null}, code=UNPREDICTABLE_GAS_LIMIT, version=providers/5.5.1)
    //...
  method: 'call',
  transaction: {
    from: '0x73257cE508dBB94Ff78C27381FddD42FB7266Ba4',
    gasLimit: BigNumber { value: "50000000" },
    to: '0x10539a06b047259f247f8c622430c22803821A00',
    data: '0x4262336000000000000000000000000073257ce508dbb94ff78c27381fddd42fb7266ba4',
    accessList: null
  }
}

Environment: Node: v14.17.4

This happens in both node and browser environments.

Search Terms gas limit, estimate gas

[ricmoo]

@nataouze I’ve added context to discussion #2849 to help explain what is going on and will be keeping that up to date if you want to hop over there. 😃

[nedgar]

Thanks for the fix @ricmoo. I’ve (finally) verified it – see https://github.com/NomicFoundation/hardhat/issues/2248#issuecomment-1250350108