Networks

Typically, we speak of mainnet and testnet as the networks of Stacks. Most wallets will be configured to mainnet by default—this is the production environment, the actual blockchain that holds real STX tokens.

As the name suggests, testnet is a public network for testing. It's a separate blockchain state that holds test tokens, which have no value.

Developers are encouraged to use StacksTestnet for testing before rolling out applications and contracts to StacksMainnet. There is even StacksDevnet and StacksMocknet for working in a local development environment for development. Stacks.js functions can be configured to use whichever network you want.

You can learn more about devnet here.

Create a network instance

import { StacksMainnet, StacksTestnet } from '@stacks/network';

const mainnet = new StacksMainnet();
const testnet = new StacksTestnet();

The constructors can also be passed a custom URL to an API, if you want to use a different API than the default.

import { StacksMainnet } from '@stacks/network';

const network = new StacksMainnet({
  url: 'https://www.mystacksnode.com/',
});