Stagenets > Testnets

Testnets are unrealistic.

They're graveyards that lack meaningful user activity, and as a result, their on-chain state is a ghost town, with unused smart contracts. That makes them a poor environment for testing smart contracts that rely on real-world conditions.

For example, imagine you're building a smart contract vault that provides liquidity to a Uniswap pool to earn yield. On a typical testnet, the Uniswap pool has no users, there are no swaps, and your vault earns nothing. You deploy it, set it up… and nothing happens.

You could try simulating swaps yourself, but you'd need to replicate real trading patterns, generate fake volume, and find reliable token faucets (good luck with that). This lack of realism affects testing all type of apps that interact with other parts of the ecosystem, for example:

• Vaults relying on trading volume for yield
• Arbitrage or liquidation bots relying on real market events
• Defi strategies that depend on real-time authentic conditions - balances, rates, oracle prices, etc…

Enter Stagenets

Mockchain's Stagenets are private testnets that bring production realism to your development environment by replaying historical mainnet blocks. They start from a real block on Ethereum (or any EVM chain), replay every block from that point onward, just like a live chain, and re-execute relevant mainnet transactions as they go.

This gives you a testnet that mirrors mainnet's evolving state, running the exact transactions your app cares about. You're not working with a stale snapshot or trying to simulate activity, you're operating in conditions that reflect reality.

Let's go back to the Uniswap vault example: Your Stagenet replays all real swaps from the Uniswap pool, your vault earns yield from those swaps, in real time, and you see exactly how much it would have earned on mainnet. No fake conditions. No time spent simulating reality. No guesswork.

A Complete Test Environment

Mockchain's Stagenets come with everything you need to build, test, and iterate on smart contracts - all in one place:

Project Contracts

Each contract gets its own dashboard and tooling:

• Track and inspect ETH/ERC20 balances and function results over time
• State variable inspector
• Version manager and deployment tracker
• Auto-generated interaction UI

Additional Features

• Contract CI/CD - contracts in linked GitHub repos are automatically imported as project contracts and are updated when new versions are pushed
• Tailored Explorer - a custom block explorer enhanced with your project's context
• Protocol Simulator - one-click mainnet replication of DeFi protocols like Uniswap or Aave on your stagenet
• Unlimited Faucets - instantly mint ETH and any ERC20 token

Experience the power of production-like testing with Mockchain's Stagenets.