Impersonate Accounts

Add an address to your Stagenet’s impersonation allowlist from the command line. Once impersonated, your Stagenet will accept eth_sendTransaction requests where from is the impersonated address — no private key required.

Targets your active stagenet — see Target a Stagenet. Backed by the impersonation RPC methods.

Start impersonating


contract.dev impersonate 0x28C6c06298d514Db089934071355E5743bf21d60

Argument	Description
`<address>`	The address to impersonate
`--fund <amount>`	Optional. Top up the impersonated address with native tokens (e.g. for gas). Accepts decimal, 0x-hex, or `"1 ether"` / `"1000000 wei"`.

Funding in one shot:


contract.dev impersonate 0x28C6... --fund "1 ether"


Impersonating 0x28c6c06298d514db089934071355e5743bf21d60
  funded with +1000000000000000000 wei (new balance: 1000000000000000000)

`impersonate stop`

Remove an address from the allowlist. After this, unsigned transactions from that address are rejected unless you impersonate it again.


contract.dev impersonate stop 0x28C6...

`impersonate list`

Print every address currently on the allowlist (lowercased), one per line.


contract.dev impersonate list

Notes

Impersonation only works for transactions sent through eth_sendTransaction. If your wallet signs locally with a private key, it will use eth_sendRawTransaction and impersonation will not apply. Use a JSON-RPC signer (e.g. provider.getSigner(address) in ethers, or createWalletClient({ account, transport: http(url) }) in viem).
Impersonated accounts still pay gas. The --fund flag is a shortcut for topping them up; you can also fund them with balance add.