Invalid value undefined supplied to : RpcBlockWithTransactions | null/totalDifficulty: QUANTITY

[0xmichalis]

Version of Hardhat

2.19.5

What happened?

Forking a Base Sepolia node has started failing with the following error:

Errors: Invalid value undefined supplied to : RpcBlockWithTransactions | null/totalDifficulty: QUANTITY

Minimal reproduction steps

git clone https://github.com/0xmichalis/hardhat-5986-repro
cd hardhat-5986-repro
npm i
npx hardhat test

Search terms

No response

[0xmichalis]

Seems to work fine with the latest Hardhat version (2.22.16)

[0xmichalis]

This has started happening since today. It'd be great to understand whether there is a workaround we can apply without changing versions as it's hard to do that at the moment (upgrading breaks our tests for some reason).

[aspiers]

Wild guess this is the same as #5816 which was fixed in v2.22.14.

[aspiers]

See also #2106 and #2313 although those are much older and no longer valid.

[aspiers]

Looks like OpenZeppelin Defender just got bitten with the same issue 😆

[aspiers]

Although to be more precise, they can't be relying on hardhat from within their frontend. I'm guessing that the commonality is maybe NomicFoundation/edr#696, since the hardhat fix was just to bump EDR to 0.6.4 to incorporate a fix for that.

[kanej]

The upcoming 2.22.17 release makes the totalDifficulty field optional.
I suspect, however, there is not a work around for the removal of totalDifficulty from the API without changing version.
The versions of Hardhat after 2.19 uses EDR for the underlying Hardhat node (a rewrite of Hardhat node in Rust). If you are running into bugs after upgrading could you post them as issues here to help us diagnose any problems EDR has introduced?

[nebasuke]

EDR depends on the RpcBlockWithTransactions from hardhat-core definitions, so updating Hardhat to the upcoming 2.22.17 would be the way to go. Do let us know if there unexpected downstream consequences on the EDR level though!

See also #6007.

[schaable]

Hardhat 2.22.17 has been released and includes a fix for this issue. You can see the release notes here.