think the biggest change for any QA manager moving from Web2 to Web3 is the mental shift you stop thinking about “does the feature work?” and start thinking “what happens if this fails on-chain?”
In Web2, if something breaks, you roll back or hotfix. In Web3, once a transaction is confirmed, that mistake lives forever. You can’t “undo” it. That’s why when I interview QA candidates, I pay more attention to how they think through risk than which tools they’ve used.
When someone says, “I tested the API and it’s fine,” I’ll usually ask “Did you check what happened after that transaction hit the contract?”
That’s the gap most people miss.
I want to see if you understand how a click on the front end connects all the way to a state change on-chain.
Good QA folks in Web3 usually talk about:
verifying events and logs to confirm the contract behaved correctly,
simulating failed transactions (like revert or out-of-gas),
checking balances and states across testnets,
and testing how the UI handles wallet errors or RPC timeouts.
These are the small details that tell me you understand the system end-to-end.
Tools don’t matter that much, but knowing a few helps.
Hardhat, Foundry, Tenderly, and Blockscout are the ones you’ll hear most.
For front-end flows, Playwright + MetaMask setup works fine.
But again, I’d rather see a clear thought process than a list of tools.
If you can explain why you chose a certain setup or how you debug a broken transaction, that’s way more valuable.
When we discuss test strategy, I listen for how you plan for layers —
off-chain (API, UI, server),
on-chain (contracts, gas, events),
and the bridge between them (RPC calls, wallets, nodes).
Most people only test the first layer. The ones who stand out think across all three.
If you want to build confidence before your next interview, try this:
write a few simple test cases in Hardhat for a basic token or voting contract.
Run them on a local node (Ganache or Anvil).
Then deliberately break something — remove a require(), change gas limits — and see how your test fails.
That exercise alone teaches more than any tutorial.
So to answer your question —
Web3 QA managers look for curiosity, not just coverage.
They want to see that you understand what’s different about testing in an immutable, decentralized system.
If you can show that you don’t just “check boxes,” but actually think about how failure behaves on-chain, that’s what gets noticed.
