debug_traceTransaction

debug_traceTransaction takes one already-mined transaction and replays it instruction by instruction, rebuilding the exact EVM state of the block where it landed and emitting a step-by-step record of execution. That is visibility no plain read method can offer. BNB Smart Chain (BSC) is a PoSA network with roughly three-second blocks where BNB pays gas and BEP-20 tokens flow through venues like PancakeSwap and Venus, so most traces here mean unpicking a DeFi interaction. Point the call at the JSON-RPC endpoint https://bsc.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY on chain ID 56. Re-running against historical state is heavy, so it wants a debug-enabled archive node.

Use cases

• Pin down why a BEP-20 swap or contract call reverted by reading the opcode and stack contents at the REVERT instruction.
• Profile per-opcode gas to find the hot spots worth trimming before a contract ships to mainnet.
• Rebuild the full internal call tree of a sandwich or arbitrage bundle with callTracer to study how the transaction moved value.
• Capture pre-execution account and storage state through prestateTracer for a security post-mortem after an exploit.

Parameters

Response

Example request

1curl https://bsc.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{
5    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
6    "method": "debug_traceTransaction",
7    "params": [
8        "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
9        {}
10      ],
11    "id": 1
12  }'

Try it live in the BNB Smart Chain playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Any transaction older than the last few thousand blocks needs full archive state, so a pruned BSC node simply rejects it.
• The default structLog stream can swell to hundreds of megabytes on a dense transaction. Switch to callTracer, or just turn off the stack and storage dumps in the options object.
• Custom JavaScript tracers run in a sandboxed interpreter and can hit the node timeout on a long-running transaction. Lower tiers may rate-limit or refuse the call outright.

Supported networks

• Mainnet — Chain ID: 56
• Testnet — Chain ID: 97

See also

• debug_traceCall
• debug_traceBlockByHash
• trace_transaction
• trace_replayTransaction

1curl https://bsc.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
4  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"debug_traceTransaction","params":["",{}]}'