The RPC said Base was healthy. The first contract read still failed.

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Project Overview

Agent Bounties is an open-source, payment-first bounty network. One of its GitHub Actions turns an exact GitHub identity and wallet into a participant record on Base before that participant can enter certain funded bounty flows.

That registration path is deliberately fail-closed: if the action cannot prove the right chain, registry, attester, identity, transaction receipt, and final eligibility state, it must stop rather than pretending registration succeeded.

While using the real registration workflow, I found a narrower but consequential reliability bug. The action considered an RPC endpoint healthy after only an eth_chainId check. The endpoint correctly reported Base mainnet, but refused the first participant-registry archive read with HTTP 403. Because selection had already committed to that endpoint, the ordered fallbacks were never tried.