Quick note: This article has been written by Guest Author: MSBivens0x and we would like to thank him for this.

In web3 development rigorous testing procedures are mandatory, the development process has notoriously been likened to that of hardware development. This is because once your smart contract is pushed to the mainnet, it’s out there for good. And, unless you’re using some upgrade process like migration or proxy patterns, there’s actually nothing you can do.

These upgradeable contracts also aren’t the ultimate solution, using these comes with their own host of issues including potential vulnerabilities and cost.

So what does this actually mean? Well, it means that you need to be damn sure you’ve tested your smart contracts in every way and a method o help with this is wallet impersonations. Something that has been built into Hardhat for a while now, wallet impersonations let you use another wallet or account and make transactions using their tokens, of course, this can only be done from a locally forked blockchain with Hardhat.

Wallet impersonating should be a part of your testing process. Using a wallet of an actual person is like using fake data to run tests in web2 production cycles. It’s an opportunity for you to conduct research and identify wallets that you believe would use your dApp and then see how they would interact with your dApp and understand what kind of results they might encounter.

Understanding what wallets to impersonate and use is something your team will have to decide. You might have airdropped a token super early, in which case you could run a query for the wallet addresses that have this token and pick a few to use. Alternatively, you could be looking for wallets that have a token from another project or even a combination of other projects, you could then pick from the returned lists and use these as your wallets for impersonations during testing.

With wallet(s) chosen you can then plug-and-play, here’s an example from the Hardhat docs.

With this, you can send transactions as if you are the account holder, returning varied results that can give you additional information about how specific wallets can or would engage with your product.

If you’re going to take the testing process to the next level and control the forked mainnet to match your needs and expectations then the solution is BuildBear, we combine this with Hardhat’s hardhat_impersonateAccount.

We can do this by first setting up and customizing your node (you can find articles I’ve previously written on your customization options with forking, hardhat, and EVM). We launch this private node and deploy our smart contracts using the typical script but set up for BuildBear like below.

thanks to the BB team for this

What BuildBear adds to this is the control of a locally hosted forked blockchain and the larger environment of a testnet. The highly customized node can be forked from any EVM and from any block number. Having complete control over your teams testing environment means that you can decide the exact parameters you need to test your product in a controlled environment. This ensures a rigorous testing process and helps everyone build confidence in your product!

Here’s how that script might look:

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About BuildBear:

BuildBear offers developers a convenient platform to create a customized Private Testnet network for testing their DApps. With the ability to fork EVM chains, developers can create a private network tailored to their needs.

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