Setup

Before writing our contracts, clone the template repo that has the UI for the frontend already setup:

git clone https://github.com/sarahschwartz/interop-messages-defi-demo.git
cd interop-messages-defi-demo

Create another folder called contracts and move inside this folder:

mkdir contracts
cd contracts

Initialize a new hardhat project in the contracts folder:

npx hardhat --init

Select the options to use Hardhat 3 and a TypeScript project using Mocha and Ethers.js. Select yes to install all of the default dependencies.

Once the project is initialized, you can delete the template files in the contracts, ignition/modules, scripts, and tests folders.

rm -rf ./contracts/*
rm -rf ./ignition/modules/*
rm -rf ./scripts/*
rm -rf ./test/*

To make the interop script more straightforward, we can use the zksync-ethers and zksync-contracts SDKs.

Inside the hardhat project, run the command below to install these dependencies:

npm install -D zksync-ethers @matterlabs/zksync-contracts

Hardhat config

Next, update the hardhat.config.ts file to configure our local or testnet networks: