Hardhat Deployment Hangs While Local Substrate Node Stays Idle (No Blocks Produced)

Tech Talk
1

I’m trying to test my local setup that connects Hardhat Ignition to my custom Substrate-based EVM-compatible node built from the Polkadot SDK.

In one terminal, I start my Hardhat node:

npx hardhat node

In another terminal, I deploy using Ignition:

npx hardhat ignition deploy ./ignition/modules/StorageModule.js --network localNode

However, the deployment hangs indefinitely at this stage:

 ✔ Confirm deploy to network localNode (420420420)? … yes 

Hardhat Ignition 🚀

Resuming existing deployment from

 ./ignition/deployments/chain-420420420 Deploying [ StorageModule ]

At the same time, my Substrate node terminal shows:

2025-10-23 16:23:56 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0xb066…a2c6), finalized #0 (0xb066…a2c6), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0 2025-10-23 16:24:01 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0xb066…a2c6), finalized #0 (0xb066…a2c6), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0

2

Hey @AbdulrahmanFiala

Is your node a parachain node, e.g. like the OpenZeppeling EVM template or a standalone node? For the OZ EVM you would potentially need a more complex setup, either with docker compose or zombienet, for the standalone version it could be sufficient to start with the dev flag. Maybe check out https://substrate.stackexchange.com/ as well for some previous questions in that regard. Cheers

3

No, it’s a normal standalone node. I’m following this docs BTW, and I’m still facing the same issue.
Docs: Use Hardhat with Polkadot Hub | Polkadot Developer Docs