Stagenets
A Stagenet is a private EVM testnet that replays a real chain. It holds production state — contracts, liquidity, prices, accounts — in an environment you control.
Use it to re-run a transaction from an alert episode against live state, test a fix, or stage an upgrade or parameter change before mainnet.
Stagenets are powered by Mainnet Replay, which keeps your Stagenet in sync with the chain it replicates while preserving changes made by your own transactions.
Standard workflow
- Create a Stagenet for the production chain you want to test against, in the app or with
contract.dev stagenet create. - Push your contracts from your local Hardhat/Foundry project with the CLI.
- Deploy your contracts to the Stagenet using your existing scripts.
- Inspect each deployment in its dashboard.
Stagenets vs forks vs public testnets
| Environment | Good for | Staging fit |
|---|---|---|
| Local fork | Fast one-off tests against a snapshot of mainnet. | Local and short-lived, with no shared team environment or UI for analysis. |
| Public testnet | Public deployment rehearsal and frontend/wallet testing. | State, liquidity, oracle values, and activity differ from production. |
| Stagenet | Production-grade staging before mainnet. | A persistent private testnet that follows real chain state, with built-in tools and dashboards. |
Using a Stagenet
Each Stagenet exposes a standard Ethereum JSON-RPC endpoint, so it works with your existing stack: Hardhat, Foundry, wallets, ethers.js, viem, deployment scripts, and frontends. Think of it as a drop-in upgrade for your current testnet.
Agents, scripts, and tools can also control Stagenets programmatically via the CLI.
What each Stagenet includes
- Dashboard — the Stagenet’s live overview: chain, block height, RPC URL, and recent activity.
- Explorer — blocks and decoded transactions on your Stagenet.
- Contracts — a dashboard per contract, created automatically for the ones you push and deploy.
- Tools — a faucet and the Platform Wallet in the app; funded wallets, impersonation, state overrides and function overrides from the CLI.
Supported chains
Stagenets can currently replicate:
- Ethereum
- Base
- Optimism
- Arbitrum
- Polygon
- Avalanche
- BNB Smart Chain
- Monad
If you need support for another EVM chain, reach out to us.