This page documents a specific use case of Kurtosis: ecosystem developers for a particular L1 or L2 can spin up a local and private fully representative testnet defined in a Kurtosis package.

User Personas:

Use case/persona Common pain points How Kurtosis does things differently
Single-chain dApp Developers Building dApps requires developers to test that their logic and functions work as intended on the specific VM they intend to deploy to and are therefore beholden to the behaviors of their public, live testnet - behaviors which are often out of their control. Issues that are common can include: scarce test tokens, unexpected block re-orgs, unannounced block production halts, as well as slower block production and validation speeds. Builders find themselves dealing with problems that are not specific or relevant to their dApp but must do so to successfully ship their dApp. Kurtosis frees dApp developers from the constraints of building and testing against public, live testnets by letting engineers develop their applications locally against a representative model of the underlying network.
Multi-chain dApp developers It is difficult to stand up environments that simulate multiple blockchains and their behaviors for developers to test cross-chain functionalities. This could include bridges, oracles, or exchanges. Kurtosis enables multi-chain builders to simulate and validate that their business logic functions as intended across various networks and VMs in an representative but also private and isolated environment (especially for non-public or proprietary logic).

Because of the composability feature of Kurtosis, you can import only the pieces of your system you need to stitch together the environment you want.

For example, you can import the Ethereum and Avalanche packages, and then add your bridge on top to test the successful bridging of assets and messages across the Ethereum and Avalanche blockchains. | | Infrastructure/Middleware Developers | Building backend services, or sophisticated middleware, which interacts with L1 RPC endpoints often requires full control over the deployed node service for useful prototyping, debugging, and testing. | Kurtosis allows infrastructure and middleware developers to treat the deployment logic of their private testnets as a black box, while still having the controls via https://docs.kurtosis.com/explanations/reusable-environment-definitions/#what-does-a-reusable-solution-look-liketo customize the environment to their own needs. |

🚀 Real World Examples (expand each bullet to learn more)