DEV Community

Cover image for ๐Ÿ”— I Connected ChatGPT to Smart Contracts. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Alex Roor
Alex Roor

Posted on

๐Ÿ”— I Connected ChatGPT to Smart Contracts. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

TL;DR: I wanted to teach GPT how to interact with Ethereum. The result? An agent that can parse ABIs, call contract methods, and almost sent $50 to a random wallet. Almost.

๐Ÿค– Why Put LLMs Into Web3?
I work at the intersection of AI and blockchain, and lately Iโ€™ve been wondering:
we still write contract.methods.transfer() manually,
while LLMs already build entire backends for us.

So I built a prototype AI assistant that can:

Read ABI files;

Interpret method signatures and data types;

Act as a CLI helper or Telegram bot to interact with contracts for you.

โš™๏ธ Mini Stack
Node.js + ethers.js โ€” to handle contract interactions

OpenAI API โ€” to parse ABI and generate code

Express.js โ€” simple interface to test commands

๐Ÿงช Test #1: Reading Contracts
I started with the ABI of USDT (classic ERC20).
Fed it to GPT-4 and asked:

"What does the method transfer(address,uint256) do?"

LLM answered:

โ€œThis method sends tokens from the current account to a specified addressโ€ฆโ€

โœ… It worked. But GPT started hallucinating about return values and gas costs โ€” so I tuned the temperature down.

๐Ÿงจ Test #2: Executing Transactions
Next step: use LLM to generate the full transfer code.
Prompted with something like:

โ€œSend 50 USDT to this addressโ€ฆโ€
โ†’ await contract.transfer("0xabc...", ethers.utils.parseUnits("50", 6))

Then the chaos began:

Wrong decimal assumption (USDT uses 6, GPT assumed 18)

Address was missing the 0x

At one point it suggested sending the entire balance via signer.getBalance()

๐Ÿง  Lesson:
AI is a great co-pilot โ€” but never let it hold the keys. Not yet.

๐Ÿ” What's Next?
No, Iโ€™m not giving GPT my private key.
Transactions are only executed after explicit user confirmation.

But imagine an AI acting like a DevOps assistant for Web3:

Listing methods;

Fetching logs;

Running gas estimates.

Right now itโ€™s just a CLI toy โ€” but I already see the real-world use cases:

DAO dashboards;

AI interfaces for trackers (integrating with WhiteBIT API maybe? ๐Ÿ‘€);

Voice control for non-coders: โ€œsend 20 tokens to Alex.โ€

๐Ÿ“Œ Final Thoughts
Merging LLMs with Web3 is like handling two fireballs โ€”
donโ€™t leave them unattended,
but if you train them right, they could be the future of crypto UX.

Top comments (0)