
Research
2025 Report: Destructive Malware in Open Source Packages
Destructive malware is rising across open source registries, using delays and kill switches to wipe code, break builds, and disrupt CI/CD.
Hardhat is an extensible developer tool that helps smart contract developers increase productivity by reliably bringing together the tools they want.

Hardhat is an Ethereum development environment for professionals. It facilitates performing frequent tasks, such as running tests, automatically checking code for mistakes or interacting with a smart contract.
Built by the Nomic Foundation for the Ethereum community.
To install Hardhat and initialize a new project, run the following commands in an empty directory:
npx hardhat --init
This will take you through an interactive setup process to get started.
To learn more about Hardhat, check out the documentation.
Truffle is a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum, aiming to make life as an Ethereum developer easier. It offers similar functionalities to Hardhat, such as compiling, deploying, and testing smart contracts. However, Hardhat is often praised for its flexibility and the ease of integrating with other tools.
Embark is a framework for serverless Decentralized Applications using Ethereum, IPFS, and other platforms. It allows for easy development and deployment of smart contracts and dApps. Compared to Hardhat, Embark offers more out-of-the-box integrations with decentralized storage and communication protocols.
Brownie is a Python-based development and testing framework for smart contracts targeting the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is similar to Hardhat in terms of functionalities but is more suited for developers who prefer Python over JavaScript.
FAQs
Hardhat is an extensible developer tool that helps smart contract developers increase productivity by reliably bringing together the tools they want.
The npm package hardhat receives a total of 180,081 weekly downloads. As such, hardhat popularity was classified as popular.
We found that hardhat demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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