Ethers/6/Providers

In addition to all the ethers.providers.* being moved to ethers.*, the biggest change developers need to keep in mind is that Web3Provider (which historically was used to wrap link-web3 providers) is now called BrowserProvider which is designed to wrap EIP-1193 providers, which is the standard that both modern Web3.js and injected providers offer.

Example

Before

provider = new ethers.providers.Web3Provider(window.ethereum);

After

provider = new ethers.BrowserProvider(window.ethereum);

Method for broadcasting transactions to the network has changed

Before

provider.sendTransaction(signedTx);

After

provider.broadcastTransaction(signedTx);

The StaticJsonRpcProvider in v5 is now integrated into the v6 JsonRpcProvider directly. When connecting to a network which cannot change its network, it is much more efficient to disable the automatic safety check ethers performs.

Before

provider = new StaticJsonRpcProvider(url, network);

After

// This method is involved in tranformation
// v6: If you know the network ahead of time and wish to avoid even a single eth_chainId call
provider = new JsonRpcProvider(url, network, {
  staticNetwork: network,
});


// If you want to transform your StaticJsonRpcProvider into below method you have to do it manually

// v6: If you want the network automatically detected, this will query eth_chainId only once
provider = new JsonRpcProvider(url, undefined, {
  staticNetwork: true
});

Since the fees for Ethereum chains has become more complicated, all Fee parameters in v6 were coalesced into a single .getFeeData method. While gasPrice is no longer widely used in modern networks, when using a legacy network, it is available using that method.

Before

await provider.getGasPrice();

After

(await provider.getFeeData()).gasPrice