Is it possible that Ganache can handle a private key without an "0x" prefix, but Parity cannot?

Question

I am trying to sign and send a transaction as follows:

let signedTx  = await web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction(options, PRIVATE_KEY);
let txReceipt = await web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(signedTx.rawTransaction);
...

The PRIVATE_KEY variable is a 40-character long hexadecimal string, without an 0x prefix.

The options variable is an object containing to, data and gas fields.

My code completes successfully on Ganache, but when I run it on a fully-synced Parity node connected to ropsten, I get the following error:

Insufficient funds.
The account you tried to send transaction from does not have enough funds.
Required 8000000000000000 and got: 0.

My account definitely has more than 0 ether on ropsten (see https://ropsten.etherscan.io/address/0x1c492da58f6396be2880576cc513c5b108450429), and I can even verify it locally (via web3.js):

let balance = await this.web3.eth.getBalance("0x1c492da58f6396be2880576cc513c5b108450429");
console.log(balance);

So here is the thing.

I was able to resolve this problem by adding 0x at the beginning of the PRIVATE_KEY variable.

Hence my question - is it possible that web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction runs differently on Ganache and on Parity?

Thank you!

Answer 1

OK, I've finally figured this out.

When I open Ganache, it automatically unlocks each one of the accounts specified by the --account flag (or 10 default accounts if no accounts are specified). So the private keys of those accounts are not even needed here in order to sign and send transactions.