Deploy, Issue and Transfer Tokens
Last updated
Last updated
Navigate to your contracts directory.
Pull the latest release
This repository contains several contracts, but it's the eosio.token
contract that is important for this section.
Before we can deploy the token contract we must create an account to deploy it to, we'll use the eosio development key for this account.
To create a new token, call create
action with the correct parameters. This action accepts 1 argument, it consists of:
An issuer that is an eosio account. In this case, it's alice
. This issuer will be the one with the authority to call issue
and/or perform other actions such as closing accounts or retiring tokens.
An asset
type composed of two pieces of data, a floating-point number sets the maximum supply and a symbol
in capitalized alpha characters which represents the asset. For example, "1.0000 SYS".
Below is a concise way to call this method, using positional arguments:
The command above created a new token SYS
with a precision of 4 decimals and a maximum supply of 1000000000.0000 SYS. It also designates alice
as the issuer. To create this token, the contract requires the permission of the eosio.token
account. For this reason, -p eosio.token@active
was passed to authorize this action.
An alternate approach uses named arguments:
Execute the command above:
The issuer alice
can now issue new tokens. As mentioned earlier only the issuer can do so, therefore, -p alice@active
must be provided to authorize the issue
action.
This time the output contains several actions: one issue
action and three transfer
actions. While the only action signed was issue
, the issue
action performed an inline transfer
and the inline transfer
notified the sender and receiver accounts. The output indicates all the action handlers that were called, the order they were called in, and whether any output was generated by the action.
Technically, the eosio.token
contract could have skipped the inline transfer
and opted to just modify the balances directly. However, in this case the eosio.token
contract is following a token convention that requires that all account balances be derivable by the sum of the transfer actions that reference them. It also requires that the sender and receiver of funds be notified so they can automate handling deposits and withdrawals.
To inspect the transaction, try using the -d -j
options, which indicate "don't broadcast" and "return the transaction as json", which you may find useful during development.
Now that account alice
has been issued tokens, transfer some of them to account bob
.
Check alice
's balance. Notice that tokens were deducted from the account.
Excellent! Everything adds up.
Now check if bob
received the tokens using
: Introduction to Application Binary Files (ABI) and how the ABI file correlates to the eosio.token
contract.