Illegal Operations and Penalties

Illegal operations/invalid operation codes compiled from smart contracts not only fail to deploy/execute, but also incur a full penalty of the fee_limit. As users normally set the fee limit to 1000 TRX (max), this is a significant penalty and is even more costly if the user attempts to retry the operations automatically.

There are two common ways invalid operation codes are triggered:

1. User is manually trying to inject arbitrarily invalid operation code into the smart contract bytecode.
2. User is using a newer compiler before new operation codes are supported. Specifically as a past example, before the "TRC-10 token transfer in smart contracts" is allowed (https://tronscan.org/#/proposal/15), if user happens to use the new compiler to deploy/execute smart contracts, the full fee_limit would be deducted from the user account.

pragma solidity ^0.4.24;

contract transferTokenContract {
    constructor() payable public{}
  
    function() payable public{}
  
    function transferTokenTest(address toAddress, uint256 tokenValue, trcToken id) payable public {
        require(id > 1000000);
        toAddress.transferToken(tokenValue, id);
    }
  
    function msgTokenValueAndTokenIdTest() public payable returns (trcToken, uint256) {
        trcToken id = msg.tokenid;
        uint256 value = msg.tokenvalue;
        return (id, value);
    }
  
    function getTokenBalanceTest(address accountAddress) payable public returns (uint256) {
        trcToken id = 1000001;
        require(id > 1000000);
        return accountAddress.tokenBalance(id);
    }
}

In the above example, transferToken maps to op code 0xd0, tokenBalance maps to op code 0xd1, msg.tokenid maps to op code 0xd2, msg.tokenvalue maps to op code 0xd3. If any of these is used before network has activated the new TRC-10 transfer proposal, TVM will reject this operation and penalize the entire fee_limit.

The general rule of thumb is to always use the latest Tron-Web/Tron-Box for compiling/deploying/executing contracts. When switching between Testnet and Mainnet, make sure to re-compile all contracts in case of different network parameters deciding different sets of valid operation codes.