How Wintermute Ran Alpha Challenge With Synced Mainnet State on Virtual TestNets
"Instead of running our own infrastructure and increasing time to market, we decided to use Virtual TestNets, and the integration was really quick and straightforward. With Tenderly, we had a prototype in several hours, while it would take us two or three weeks to set up everything on our end."
Igor Igamberdiev
Head of research at Wintermute
As one of the largest crypto liquidity and OTC providers, Wintermute facilitates high-volume trading and enables liquidity provisioning for investment professionals. From RFQ strategies, arbitrage, and liquidation to venture investment and research, Wintermute has been driving the industry forward through a range of DeFi activities.
For the last couple of years, Wintermute has organized the Alpha Challenge, originally intended for internal recruitment purposes. However, the challenge quickly transformed into a public good, educating Web3 enthusiasts through a range of tasks related to MEV, trading, and other real-world DeFi strategies. As a result, Alpha Challenge participants were able to hone their skills and experiment with different projects on the EVM.
For easier creation, deployment, and automation of the Alpha Challenge, the Wintermute team integrated Virtual TestNets, a collaborative development and testing infrastructure. With over 2800 instances of Virtual TestNets, the team was able to organize and manage the challenge without the manual overhead.
Why the manual setup in GitHub repos was an overhead
Wintermute organized the first Alpha Challenge 2024 as a way to recruit potential research team members.
Unlike the standard recruitment process, the challenge presents participants with realistic trading tasks that they would encounter at Wintermute. This way, the participants can build case studies to present their solutions to real problems while also gaining valuable practical knowledge in DeFi strategies and trading scenarios, such as MEV or flash loans.
However, the setup for the Alpha Challenge 2024 brought a lot of time-consuming management tasks for the Wintermute team. The team presented the tasks in a simple GitHub repo, while participants submitted individual local Foundry forks with their solutions, which brought a significant overhead for the team.
“Manual reviewing on our side took a lot of time for the Alpha Challenge 2024, so we needed a way to automate the process”. – Igor Igamberdiev, head of research at Wintermute
Additionally, the Wintermute team couldn’t repurpose any of the existing CTF infrastructure. Their tasks focused on realistic trading challenges and problems, which required forks with the actual onchain state. In some tasks, Wintermute required the participants to submit transaction simulations, and the majority of them used Tenderly.
“If people hadn’t provided transaction simulations, we had to compile and check everything on our own, which was really inefficient and took a lot of time.” – Igor Igamberdiev
How Wintermute staged the Alpha Challenge on Virtual TestNets
The individual Wintermute team members started using Tenderly in 2020 as the only tooling solution that provided in-depth traces for non-Ethereum blockchains. Additionally, having previously seen the SEAL team run an emergency drill workshop on Virtual TestNets, Wintermute decided to integrate Virtual TestNets for the Alpha Challenge 2025.
“Instead of running our own infrastructure and increasing time to market, we decided to use Virtual TestNets, and the integration was really quick and straightforward. With Tenderly, we had a prototype in several hours, while it would take us two or three weeks to set up everything on our end.” – Igor Igamberdiev
The Wintermute saw a 5-6x increase in the number of registrations for the Alpha Challenge 2025. Each participant had their own Virtual TestNet with a gas stipend for executing and testing different trading scenarios, which was possible thanks to the unlimited faucet built into Virtual TestNets.
How Wintermute prepared realistic tasks on the actual mainnet state
With Virtual TestNets, the Wintermute team was able to prepare challenge tasks on the actual mainnet state. They provided Virtual TestNet RPCs to Alpha Challenge participants so they could interact with a specific state and experiment with liquidation, MEV, and other trading strategies.
“This interactivity was really important for people to be engaged and experiment with different approaches and strategies, such as using indexers to examine specific blocks and find pools with the highest liquidity on a particular day. They could also test if their strategies actually worked, which wasn’t possible without Virtual TestNets.” – Igor Igamberdiev
When it comes to the entire setup on Virtual TestNets, the Wintermute team followed a few steps:
- They used the Virtual TestNet API to fork a mainnet at a specific block, getting the Ethereum state most relevant for a particular coding task.
- They set up one parent Virtual TestNet, using state manipulation cheatcodes to adjust the conditions as needed.
- The team then forked the parent Virtual TestNet, creating multiple, user-specific instances.
- They would then use the unlimited faucet to supply gas stipends to each participant’s registration address so they can experiment freely with different strategies.
- Finally, the team used the built-in private and public explorers to review the execution flows and allowed the participants to do the same.
How the built-in Virtual TestNet explorers facilitated the process
Having the fully integrated explorer with admin access within Virtual TestNets greatly facilitated the review process for the Wintermute team. They could follow the execution flow, check state transitions, and examine the sources of liquidity used for the tasks.
Unlike the previous year, when the team used Foundry, they didn’t have to dive into and decipher source code. Instead, they had human-readable, easily accessible information in the Tenderly Dashboard.
Additionally, the Wintermute team enabled the public Virtual TestNet explorer for their participants. The participants could easily obtain it from the Wintermute Alpha Challenge website with a click, gaining full access to their data, execution flows, and debugging tools.
“Based on the feedback we received, people were happy we provided this additional public explorer feature because it was really helpful, as not everyone was a Solidity pro or tech-advanced.” – Igor Igamberdiev
Building future Alpha Challenges on Virtual TestNets
The Wintermute team intends to use Tenderly for their future Alpha Challenges as well, providing realistic scenarios in safe, production-synced environments. With Virtual TestNets, Wintermute participants can experiment with the actual state of Ethereum, try out real-world strategies, and gain practical DeFi knowledge.
Additionally, the Wintermute team can rely on Tenderly’s support every step of the way, facilitating their entire process.
“We’re really happy we chose Tenderly as a partner and infra provider for the Alpha Challenge. The team was really active and helpful in the chat during the challenge period.” – Igor Igamberdiev
As Wintermute continues to run Alpha Challenges on Virtual TestNets, they also have an opportunity to explore other ways to integrate Virtual TestNets into their workflows. For instance, major DeFi teams use Virtual TestNets in their internal workflows:
- Sky (ex-MakerDAO) enables faster, collaborative development
- Yearn Finance builds and debugs faster on a consistent, shared state
- Superform runs end-to-end tests on synced onchain data
To try out Virtual TestNets, fork any of the 100+ supported chains in milliseconds!
