Using Wallet Private Key on Besu Hyperledger Network

I’m working on a project using the besu hyperledger network and I found that creating an instance for the wallet with the private key doesn’t work.

new ethers.Wallet( privateKey [ , provider ] )

The solution we found was to use the wallet’s mnemonic to generate the instance.

ethers.Wallet.fromMnemonic( mnemonic [ , path ] ).connect(provider)

I would like to know if this is normal behavior and if there is any solution for using the wallet private key to sign transactions on the besu network.

[ricmoo]

The Wallet only uses eth_sendRawTransaction.

Definitely agree with adding more to “doesn’t work”. 😃

[benjamincburns]

@ricmoo if this is an issue at all, I don’t believe this is a Besu issue (disclosure, I work for the team that maintains Besu). In the case when the ethers.Wallet is given a private key explicitly, I’d expect that it shouldn’t touch any of the account management RPC calls implemented in the client.

If there is a problem, the cause can probably be observed by running Besu with TRACE logging enabled, as that will log all RPC traffic. I’d watch out for calls to eth_accounts on creation of ethers.Wallet, or for usage of eth_sendTransaction when it should be using eth_sendRawTransaction.

That said, @freitasgouvea it’d be a lot easier to understand what’s happening here if “doesn’t work” was defined a bit better, and ideally an error message/stack trace were included.