Why did my transaction fail with out of gas and how do I fix it
You see the red “Fail” on Etherscan and a deduction from your wallet. The transaction cost you money, but it did nothing. This happens more often than most people expect. The root cause is almost never an empty wallet. It is a misunderstanding of what gas actually is.
Gas has two separate components: gas limit and gas price. They are not interchangeable. The gas limit is the maximum amount of computational work a transaction is allowed to consume. The gas price is what you pay per unit of that work. A transaction can run out of gas - hit its limit - even when you hold plenty of ETH.
Consider a simple ETH transfer. A standard send uses 21,000 gas. That number is fixed. The EVM knows exactly how many operations are needed. A contract interaction is different. The contract’s code can loop, branch, read storage, or call other contracts. No one knows the exact gas cost until execution finishes. If the contract enters a loop that runs longer than expected, or if it hits a complex storage write, gas consumption can spike well above the typical estimate.
Your wallet might show a “gas limit” field that you never touch. Many wallets auto-fill a default. That default is usually safe for simple sends but can be too low for complex contract calls. If the contract needs 150,000 gas and your wallet set a limit of 100,000, the transaction will fail partway through. The work stops. The ETH spent on gas up to that point is gone. The failed transaction still gets recorded on chain.
The misconception that failed transactions cost nothing is expensive. Every failed transaction pays for the computation that ran until it hit the limit. The unused gas is refunded. But the gas that was consumed is not. You pay for nothing but a log entry on Etherscan.
How to inspect a failed transaction
Open the transaction on Etherscan. Scroll to the “data/simulate-transaction-before-signing/">Transaction Details” section. You will see two numbers: Gas Limit and Gas Used by Txn. If Gas Used is equal to Gas Limit, the transaction ran out. It hit the ceiling and stopped. If Gas Used is lower than Gas Limit, the failure was caused by something else - a revert condition in the contract, not an out-of-gas error.
Next, check the gas price. That number tells you what you paid per unit. Multiply Gas Used by Gas Price. That is the fee you lost. Etherscan shows this as a “Transaction Fee” in ETH.
To fix the issue, increase the gas limit. Do not confuse this with increasing the gas price. Raising the gas price only makes the transaction go faster. It does not give the transaction more room to compute. If you paid a high gas price but kept a low gas limit, you paid a premium for a transaction that still failed.
Most wallets let you manually set the gas limit. For a contract interaction, a safe starting point is 300,000 gas. Some complex operations like swapping on a decentralized exchange or minting an NFT can require 500,000 or more. Check the block explorer for similar transactions to the same contract. Look at the Gas Used on successful ones. Set your limit a bit above that average.
You can also use Etherscan’s Gas Tracker. It shows current gas price recommendations. But the tracker does not show gas limits. That is a separate field you must adjust yourself.
A practical example: You try to swap tokens on a DEX. Your wallet estimates 150,000 gas. The swap fails. On Etherscan you see Gas Used equals Gas Limit at 150,000. The transaction consumed all the gas and still did not finish. Next time, set the gas limit to 300,000 or 400,000. The swap will likely succeed. You will pay more in fees because you are buying more computational units, but the transaction will complete.
The date of this information is August 31, 2026. No on-chain pair or contract for basiliskawakens.xyz was found at that time. The general principles described here apply to any Ethereum Virtual Machine chain.
Failed transactions are not free. They are not a sign of a broken wallet. They are a sign that the gas limit was too low for the work required. Check Etherscan. Compare Gas Used to Gas Limit. Raise the limit. Do not raise the price. That distinction saves you money.
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