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Forking Ethereum Mainnet with Foundry: A Comprehensive Guide
Working with live smart contracts can be exciting yet very risky in the dynamic world of blockchain development. Quite often, as developers we find ourselves in a position where testing on an actual network, such as Ethereum’s Mainnet, is not practical or safe, since it may involve some accidental actions like financial loss or compromising sensitive data. That’s where forking comes in-a really powerful technique that allows us to replicate a live blockchain environment locally for safe, controlled experimentation.
What is Forking in Blockchain?
We can look at a fork in blockchain as being similar to creating a branch in a versioning system like GitHub. Just like you would create a copy of a repository in order to experiment freely without messing with the original, forking a blockchain lets you create a local copy of its state at a specific point in time. In this way, you can communicate with contracts and execute transactions in a protected manner, without real interaction with the network.
Why Fork Ethereum Mainnet?
- Safety: Test smart contracts without risking real funds.
