ABI

An Application Binary Interface (ABI) is a JSON description of a smart contract's functions and events, specifying their names, argument types and encoding so clients can construct calls and interpret results.

The EVM only understands packed bytes; the ABI is the map between those bytes and named functions and events. To call a method or decode a log, a client looks up the matching ABI entry, encodes arguments into the expected layout, and decodes the response the same way. Without the correct ABI, logs and return values stay opaque hex. Our decoded-transaction and decoded-log outputs apply known ABIs on our side, so you receive named fields from the archive RPC instead of raw calldata.