debug_traceTransaction

debug_traceTransaction is the workhorse debugger for Polygon PoS: give it a transaction hash and the Bor node re-runs that transaction instruction by instruction, capturing every opcode, stack frame, and gas charge. Polygon's Bor client is Geth-based, so the callTracer, prestateTracer, and default struct-log tracers behave exactly as on Ethereum, only here they apply to MATIC-fee transactions. Send the request to https://polygon.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY (chain ID 137, 0x89). It replays the historical transaction at opcode level, reproducing the exact EVM state at the block where it was mined.

Use cases

• Determine why a Polygon contract call reverted by inspecting the exact opcode and stack state at the REVERT instruction.
• Profile per-opcode gas consumption to find optimization hot spots, even though MATIC fees are low and high transaction counts make small savings add up.
• Reconstruct the full internal call tree of a Polygon MEV bundle using callTracer.
• Capture pre-execution account and storage state with prestateTracer for security post-mortems on Polymarket, Aave, or QuickSwap incidents.

Parameters

Response

Example request

1curl https://polygon.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 Polygon playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Any transaction older than the most recent few thousand blocks needs a Bor archive node; with Polygon's ~2-second blocks, "a few thousand blocks" is only a couple of hours of history on a full node.
• The default struct-log output can run to hundreds of MB for a complex Polygon DeFi transaction — switch to callTracer or disable stack and storage in the options to keep responses small.
• Custom JavaScript tracers run in a sandboxed interpreter and can hit the node's timeout on long-running transactions, so keep tracer logic tight.

Supported networks

• Mainnet — Chain ID: 137
• Amoy — Chain ID: 80002

See also

• debug_traceCall
• debug_traceBlockByHash
• trace_transaction
• trace_replayTransaction

1curl https://polygon.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":["",{}]}'