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# Getting Started

ct, or chain-tool, is a command-line application that has many tools for reading, analyzing and interact with the blockchain and related technologies.

ct can be installed and run on:

Windows may also work using WSL (opens new window) or Cygwin (opens new window) with bash, but is not actively tested.

# Installation

Most of the time you can simply run the installer script as follows:

curl -L https://chain-tool.blockwell.ai | sh

You can also just download the script from https://chain-tool.blockwell.ai (opens new window) and run it manually.

Alternatively you can also just download one of the packages and extract it manually: macos-arm64 (opens new window) macos-x64 (opens new window) linux-arm (opens new window) linux-arm64 (opens new window) linux-x64 (opens new window) win32-x64 (opens new window) win32-x86 (opens new window)

Note that if you install manually, you'll also need to add the bin/ct to your PATH.

# Basic Usage

To see a list of global options and commands, you can run:

ct

# Running a command

To run a command, simply give the name of the command as the first argument. For example, to use the wei command run:

ct wei

Most ct commands are part of a group, which is denoted by the command having a colon :. Left of the colon is the group, and right is the actual command. For example:

ct eth:private-key

Will run the private-key command in the eth group.

# Getting help

All commands have a short help description and examples. You can view that information by using the --help flag, for example:

ct eth:private-key --help

# Walkthrough

This walkthrough will go over a few basic commands to get you started with ct.

# Reading token information

Let's start with something simple: reading some token information from the blockchain using the contract:read command.

Run the following command:

ct -n mainnet --address 0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7 contract:read name

The output will look something like this:

info: Network: Mainnet
info: Loaded contract: Tether USD
Tether USD

The first few lines begin with info:, which means it's just informative log messages. It's telling you the network/chain ct is currently configured to use, and the smart contract it connected to.

The last line is the actual output of the command, which in this case was Tether USD. That's the name of the token.

With that, we've read the name of the token from the blockchain!

TIP

The command was a bit long because we needed to specify the network (aka. chain) and the address of the smart contract. You can use configuration files to avoid having to type those one.

We can read other information as well. All ERC20 tokens should have a symbol in addition to a name. We can read that the same way:

ct -n mainnet --address 0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7 contract:read symbol

The output is similar to before:

info: Network: Mainnet
info: Loaded contract: Tether USD
USDT

This time, it's giving us USDT, which is the symbol of the Food Coin token.

# Reading token balances

We've read basic info on the token using contract:read. Those are simple and easy, because there's only one "name" in a contract.

We'd also like to read token balances for wallets, which can be done using the balanceOf function in ERC20 tokens. However, we need to tell the command which wallet's balance we want to know.

This can be provided by giving additional arguments to contract:read. In this case, I want to know the balance of the wallet 0x47ac0Fb4F2D84898e4D9E7b4DaB3C24507a6D503. I can do that by simply adding the address as an additional argument:

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

Here's the output from this command:

info: Network: Mainnet
info: Loaded contract: Tether USD
1250000115495224

Okay, we have the balance, but there's an awful lot of zeroes. That's because Ethereum doesn't support decimals, so instead it's just a really big number. To get the value with decimals, you divide it by the

where d is the number of decimals in the token.

We can get the number of decimals from the ERC-20 token the same way as we got the name and symbol, by reading the decimals function:

ct -n mainnet --address 0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7 contract:read decimals

This gives us d = 6.

ct has a utility to convert decimals:

ct from-wei 1250000115495224 -d 6

Output:

1250000115.495224

Note that this time it didn't show the info: Network line. That's because the from-wei conversion doesn't require connecting to Ethereum.

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