How Tenor Saves Engineering Hours & Ships Faster With Virtual TestNets

Key highlights: 

• The problem: Tenor’s engineering team needs to develop and test smart contracts quickly to prepare for the mainnet launch. However, the local Anvil setup creates an infrastructure overhead and requires additional steps to enable team collaboration. Public testnets, on the other hand, would expose their code publicly and create faucet bottlenecks. 
• The solution: Tenor integrated Virtual TestNets as their primary staging and demo infrastructure, providing private, yet mainnet-synced environments with automated deployments, state manipulation cheatcodes, and unlimited test tokens without the infrastructure maintenance overhead.
• Key results: By integrating Virtual TestNets, Tenor eliminates infrastructure maintenance and lengthy testing processes, saving valuable engineering hours every week. Now, the engineering team can focus on core product development in production-synced environments, eliminating the risk of production failures that could cause financial losses. Plus, the team can share the demo environment with partners for integration and testing while maintaining full privacy over their code.

As a non-custodial, institutional-grade platform built on top of the Morpho protocol, Tenor enables fixed-rate lending and borrowing, both via onchain markets and OTC agreements settled onchain. It allows DeFi-native users and institutional clients to borrow or lend digital assets through a simple, intuitive interface, while maintaining full control of their assets. 

With the product launch planned for Q2 2026, the Tenor team is heavily focused on rapid development and iterations. For a lean engineering team competing in the fast-moving DeFi space, Tenor needs to iterate and build production-ready features fast while avoiding the infrastructure overhead that would pull engineers away from core product development.

Looking for ways to improve development velocity while eliminating time- and resource-intensive setups, Tenor integrated Virtual TestNets as their primary staging environments synced with onchain data. 

How custom testing infrastructure creates bottlenecks for Tenor engineers

Since Tenor is in the pre-launch phase, the engineering team needs to develop smart contracts quickly, test the integration with other product components, and iterate on the new features. 

However, the Tenor engineers faced a set of challenges typical of early-stage smart contract development on local nodes and public testnets. 

• The overhead and costs of custom infrastructure, requiring several hours of engineering time weekly: The team initially created a custom setup using Anvil and Foundry for smart contract testing. While this setup worked locally, it created a major overhead for the team, requiring extensive maintenance and additional work to enable team collaboration on a shared infrastructure. Aside from slowing down their development, this setup also brought high costs for their development team, causing them to waste several hours of engineering time on maintenance and manual setups each week.
• Privacy constraints, exposing pre-release code to the public: Since Tenor is in the early stages of development, the engineering team is focused on developing the contracts privately. For this reason, deploying to a public testnet such as Sepolia wasn’t an option since it would expose their unfinished code to the public, which is both a security and competitive risk. 
• Faucet and account seeding bottlenecks, creating friction and slowing down testing: Acquiring test tokens is another major bottleneck of building on public testnets. Hunting for testnet ETH and funding accounts to even enable development and testing is a major time sink for which the team didn’t have bandwidth.

“We started with a simple goal: save time. For a small team like ours, building and maintaining the supporting infrastructure would have been costly and distracting." – David Dallaire, co-founder and CTO at Tenor

To reduce the costs of infrastructure maintenance and save valuable engineering time, Tenor started exploring other options for a development and testing infrastructure, which led the team to Virtual TestNets. 

How Tenor improves development velocity with Virtual TestNets

By integrating Virtual TestNets as their primary staging infrastructure, the Tenor engineering team can validate smart contract execution pre-deployment, integrate with backend and frontend systems, and identify potential failures or vulnerabilities before shipping to mainnet.

For the Tenor platform that will handle institutional funds, catching execution issues early isn't just about product quality, but also about protecting user assets and avoiding reputational damage. With Virtual TestNets, the Tenor engineering team removed a significant infrastructure and maintenance bottleneck, saving significant engineering time while maintaining complete privacy over their code. 

1. Faster time-to-market & saved costs with shared staging environments

As a part of their development process, the Tenor engineering team first runs integration tests on local Foundry forks. Once the integration testing is done, GitHub Action scripts automatically deploy and stage contracts on Virtual TestNets.

This way, the Tenor team has a shared staging environment to battle-test the new features on a mainnet-synced state. They can also test deployment scripts on Virtual TestNets, eliminating the risk of broken deployments once they start shipping to production. 

Additionally, the Tenor platform interacts with Morpho contracts that have time locks, which prolongs their testing. With Virtual TestNets, the engineering time can eliminate these waiting periods and speed up the process by using cheatcodes to skip ahead in time. This way, the Tenor team can shorten multi-day testing cycles to minutes, which improves the velocity of the lean engineering team.

"We're interacting with contracts that have time locks. You have to deploy a Morpho vault, make some changes, wait for some time, and then come back. But with Virtual TestNets, we can just bypass the waiting period, which saves a lot of time." – David

Overall, building and testing on Virtual Testnets allows the Tenor team to save valuable engineering hours and get ready for production faster. They can validate features quickly before committing to the lengthy and expensive process of formal verification, fuzzing, and audits.

"Virtual TestNets give us a rapid feedback loop early in development, so by the time we enter formal verification and audits, we’ve already caught and resolved most issues. It makes the entire security pipeline more efficient." – David

2. Improved product quality with granular QA testing and debugging

Once the Tenor engineers deploy the contracts to the Virtual TestNet staging environment, they can share the environment with the QA team to identify potential issues in their application. If QA detects any unexpected behavior, they can share transactions with the rest of the team. 

With the built-in private explorer and debugging tools, the Tenor engineering team can then inspect what went wrong with transaction-level visibility. They can pinpoint the exact transaction, inspect arguments and state, and replicate the issue. 

"It's easy for QA to pinpoint their failing transactions, and we can just use Debugger to see where they reverted, what the arguments are, and replicate that on our end." – David

The Tenor team also uses the built-in Simulator to validate fixes, get in-depth execution data, and check for reverts. This way, the team can ensure everything works under realistic mainnet conditions, ensuring the integrity of user assets and reinforcing institutional trust.

Real user interactions in demo environments

Aside from integrating Virtual TestNets as staging environments for their internal engineering team, Tenor also uses them as a demo environment. During demos, real user interactions with their contracts generate valuable data for the platform. This allows the team to augment Tenor's test data with meaningful quotes, creating a more realistic testing environment than synthetic data could provide.

Using Virtual TestNets as demo environments also removes the typical friction of public faucets for their end users. The Tenor team enables users to fund their accounts with unlimited test tokens by simply pressing a button in the application. By using the unlimited faucet cheatcodes via the Virtual TestNet API, users automatically seed their wallets with the necessary ERC-20 assets, including BTC, USDC, and USDT.

“People really love the one-click button to seed the wallets. They just log in with their existing wallet, press a button, and have all the funds necessary. It removes the big pain point of faucets and bridging assets from other chains." – David

To enable the public sharing of their Virtual TestNet environments, the Tenor engineers use Admin and Public RPCs. While the internal team can use the Admin RPC to manipulate the environment state, they can share the demo environment externally using the Public RPC. This way, the team can keep the data unified while preserving the state of their environment, facilitating both internal development and external collaboration.

Key results: faster development without the infrastructure overhead

By integrating Virtual TestNets into their development and testing workflows, the Tenor engineers can build and iterate quickly while maintaining security and privacy during early development stages, unlocking multiple important benefits: 

• Reduced costs and saved engineering hours every week by eliminating the infrastructure maintenance overhead and lengthy testing processes
• Faster time to market by enabling quick iterations over contract updates and product features, enabling the team to prepare for their release 
• Internal team velocity and efficiency, providing a lean engineering team with a managed staging infrastructure and enterprise-grade tooling
• Complete privacy during early development, keeping their smart contracts confidential, maintaining a competitive advantage, and reducing security risks
• Meaningful, frictionless demo environments, enabling users to fund their test accounts with a click and generate realistic usage patterns

"Virtual TestNets ease all of our development and deployment processes. We don't have to worry about infrastructure or costs.” – David

Moving from staging to production with confidence on Virtual TestNets

As a team in early-development stages, Tenor needs to iterate quickly instead of allocating valuable engineering time to building and maintaining a custom testing infrastructure. With Virtual TestNets as their staging environments, the Tenor engineering team can focus on building the core product and move quickly without sacrificing security or privacy.

As the Tenor team prepares for their first release on the Ethereum Mainnet, Virtual TestNets will continue to play a critical role in their development workflow. The team is also exploring Tenderly's simulation infrastructure to prevent reverts in production, particularly for complex routing scenarios.

“As we move to production, the staging environment stays. Maintaining an uninterrupted, reliable infrastructure is non-negotiable for us, especially when user funds are at stake." – David

Ready to ship faster without the infrastructure overhead? Explore Virtual TestNets to get started!