One of the most common and confusing issues you might fall into while working on testing solidity contracts using Ethere.js on Hardhat is:

Error: VoidSigner cannot sign transactions (operation=”signTransaction”, code=UNSUPPORTED_OPERATION, version=abstract-signer/5.7.0)

It means that the current transaction you are trying to execute cannot be signed, because the signer you provided is a VoidSigner.

A VoidSigner according to the Ethers.js documentation is:

a simple Signer which cannot sign.

Essentially it’s only valid for read-only operations. If the operation you’re trying to execute changes some data, then it will fail with the above error.

Let’s say we have a contract called Foo.sol:

And the test for that contract looks like the following:

If we run this test we will get the following error:

Error: VoidSigner cannot sign transactions (operation=”signTransaction”, code=UNSUPPORTED_OPERATION, version=abstract-signer/5.7.0)

By default, when passing an address as a String, it’s considered a VoidSigner, hence why we get the error.

Instead of passing a VoidSigner, we’ll need to pass a Signer instance.

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