Forking off of mainnet for local dev

[adrianmcli]

Relevant to #1 and #3 specifically (but maybe other ones too). This may also be a blog post in and of itself.

Ganache

As a test blockchain for local development, Ganache supports forking off another chain so you can interact with already deployed contracts.

• Ganache-CLI has a --fork option that allows forking off the main chain.
• Ganache-core also has a similar interface.

Ganache-core can be used as a JS library (imported and run in-memory) while Ganache-CLI is to be used as a typical CLI binary.

The current issue is that you need to supply a provider that allows archival block access (i.e. really old blocks) and Infura (the most popular option) does not support this unless you pay. So you can either pay for the premium plan or run your own node.

Alternatively, we might be able to use Etherscan's API but we'll have to test it out to see if it works.