I ended up following https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/70244/78580 and even testing with the key there, the address of which is 0x2c7536E3605D9C16a7a3D7b1898e529396a65c23 . I suspect not having a local node was the issue with using nodejs, too. The nodejs-based git-remote-mango can likely be extended to send transactions using a private key. There must be some ethereum norm out there for storing local private keys without a node, on the filesystem, but it could also store it in the git remote url or something like i did with git-remote-bsv. commit 1e9532c2da508a3158dcecd2dabd6c45144971d6 (HEAD -> python, origin/python) Author: xloem <0xloem@gmail.com> Date: Tue Feb 8 09:09:18 2022 -0500 working on making this work without a node. presently hacked to accept a privat key as an account identifier in python.