Argument Format

There are a few special ways to provide arguments to ct commands.

Decimals

A lot of numbers on Ethereum use a large number of decimals which need to be converted. Most tokens and ETH itself have 18 decimals for everyday use, but the blockchain itself doesn't know about decimals.

For example, when you say 1 ETH, the blockchain thinks 1000000000000000000, in other words 1 followed by 18 zeroes for 18 decimals. If you tell the blockchain 1 for ETH, it will think you meant 0.000000000000000001 ETH.

There is a special decimal format you can use to make providing numbers with decimals easier:

<number>e[decimals]

Where <number> is the number you want to use, and [decimals] is the decimal count. This is commonly known as "scientific notation" for large numbers, and is often used by digital calculators.

For example 1e18 would be 1 with 18 decimals.

Addresses

Any command that accepts an address can instead read it from a file. When providing an address if the value doesn't match an address' format, it will be treated as a file.

For example, if the file binance has the following content:

Address: 0x47ac0Fb4F2D84898e4D9E7b4DaB3C24507a6D503

Then, instead of doing this:

ct -n mainnet --address 0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7 contract:read balanceOf 0x47ac0Fb4F2D84898e4D9E7b4DaB3C24507a6D503

You can use the file like this:

ct -n mainnet --address 0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7 contract:read balanceOf binance

It even works with the --address option, so if you place the address of USDT in the file usdt, you can do this:

ct -n mainnet --address usdt contract:read balanceOf binance