Hedera contract reveals tinybar/weibar confusion and gas pricing anomaly
Hedera (HBAR)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
A developer deploying a self-renewing access contract on Hedera discovered that both tinybar and weibar denomination errors return a SUCCESS receipt, making them indistinguishable from valid transactions. The issue stems from the relay converting units at the edge, meaning contracts receive tinybar but Ethereum tooling expects weibar, leading to a payable constructor that sees msg.value as zero despite receiving funds. To resolve this, the developer deployed a probe to verify that the wire round trip and display round trip maintain exact identity across 606,177 assertions.
The contract utilizes the Schedule Service at system contract 0x16b to renew itself without external keepers, executing with high precision across 30 renewals. A significant pricing anomaly emerged where unattended renewals charged 1.60263036 ℏ compared to 0.5432076 ℏ for the final renewal, a 29.5x gap attributed to Hedera refunding at most 20% of unused gas. This effectively makes the gas limit a floor for pricing rather than a safety ceiling, causing the seller to lose money on unattended renewals at 1 HBAR per period.
The findings highlight that standard test suites using Hardhat nodes provide evidence about Ethereum semantics, not necessarily Hedera's specific behavior. The developer notes that a bug with two failure modes returning success cannot be reasoned about from another chain's perspective. They recommend deploying a probe to ask the network what it was actually handed, rather than relying on memory or local tests. The code and detailed measurements are available via the retainer.edycu.dev gate and associated GitHub repository.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for HBAR, measured when this story was written up on 10 September 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
HBAR is trading at $0.07656 with a 1-hour buy ratio of 45.4% and a 4-hour buy ratio of 41.2%, indicating that selling pressure is currently outweighing buying pressure in the short term. These short-term ratios are lower than the 24-hour buy ratio of 50.4%, suggesting that the recent influx of buy orders has cooled off. Volume delta reflects this shift, showing negative flows of -$24,991 over the last hour and -$286,432 over four hours, which means more money is leaving the spot market than entering it. However, the 24-hour volume delta remains positive at +$87,371, indicating that buying pressure was stronger earlier in the day. The cumulative volume delta at the 24-hour close is +$60,473, showing that net buying has occurred over the full day despite the recent reversal. Traders have executed 90,060 trades with a total spot volume of $9,121,511 in the last 24 hours.
The latest daily buy ratio of 50.6% sits at the 71st percentile of the last 324 days, against a median of 49.3% - stronger buying than most days.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for HBAR, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, HBAR has seen net buying on all seven days, with a 7-day average buy ratio of 52.3%. The current 24-hour buy ratio of 50.4% is 1.9 percentage points below this weekly average, marking a slight dip in relative buying strength. Despite the lower ratio, the 24-hour spot volume of $9,121,511 is 1.23 times the weekly average, indicating that trading activity is unusually high compared to typical days. This elevated volume has contributed to a total 8-day volume delta of +$2,535,194 and a price increase of 2.7% over the eight-day period. While the coin remains in a net buying trend, today's activity shows a divergence between high volume and a ratio that is trending below the weekly norm.