Chapter 03: Admin account

The smart contract that will become the back-end of the election website requires a Kadena account to govern it. In this chapter you will create this account on your local Devnet. All Kadena accounts are comprised of 3 parts: an account name, keys and a predicate. Your account will have just one key. The predicate will be keys-all, meaning that any transaction must be signed by all keys in the account. Since you specify only one key, only one signature will be required per transaction. For the account name, the convention of using the single key of the account prefixed by k: will be followed.

The project files have not been changed since the last chapter, so if you are following along with the tutorial you can continue on the 01-getting-started branch. If you started the tutorial with this chapter, clone the tutorial project and change the current directory of your terminal to the project folder.

After cloning the project, switch branches to get the starter code for this chapter.

There are several ways to create a key, but in this tutorial you will create a key with Chainweaver. Open Chainweaver and make sure that the Devnet network is selected. Also make sure that your local Devnet is running. In Chainweaver, navigate to Keys via the top section of the navigation bar on the left side of the window. When you click + Generate Key on the top right, a new public key will be added to the list of public keys. Click Add k: Account on the right of this new public key and your k:account will be added to the accounts that you are watching via Chainweaver. Expand the row of the account you just added by clicking the arrow on the left side of the account name. You will see that no KDA balance exists for this account on any of the chains and the information about the owner and keyset of the account is missing. This indicates that your account does not yet exist on Devnet.

The Kadena JavaScript client will tell you the same. Open up a terminal and change the directory to the ./snippets folder in the root of your project. Execute the ./coin-details.ts snippet by running the following command. Replace k:account with your admin account.

You will see an error logged to your terminal, stating row not found, confirming that your admin account indeed does not yet exist on Devnet.

There are different routes to create an account on the Kadena blockchain. On the Mainnet, you would typically buy KDA on an exchange and transfer that KDA to the Kadena account you want to create. The Testnet has a faucet contract that allows you to receive 20 KDA on your account for free for the purpose of testing. At the time of writing this tutorial, the local Devnet does not contain the faucet contract out of the box. So, you can either create your own faucet contract or you could use a shortcut to create and fund your account. Namely, the Devnet contains a set of test accounts holding lots of KDA and their private keys are published on GitHub. You will use one of these accounts to create the admin account that governs the election smart contracts.

As you may recall from the previous chapter, the Devnet has a few smart contracts pre-installed. You will use the transferCreate function from the coin module to create the admin account on Devnet and transfer 20 KDA to the account in one operation. Open a terminal window with the current directory set to your project root. First, change the current directory to the ./snippets folder and install the TypeScript types for the coin module.

Now you are ready to run the npm script that executes the snippet ./transferCreate.ts. Open up this file in your editor to learn how the Kadena JavaScript client is used to call the transfer-create function of the coin module to create and fund your admin account. After importing the dependencies and creating the client with the right (Devnet) configuration, the main function is called with information about the sender, the receiver and the amount. The amount of KDA to transfer to the receiver is hardcoded to 20. The receiver will be your admin account name, which you will specify as an argument when running the script. The sender, sender00, is one of the pre-installed Devnet test accounts that holds some KDA on all chains. The public and private key for this account were copied over from GitHub. Inside the main function, the amount to transfer is converted to a PactDecimal, which boils down to this format: { decimal: '20.0' }. Then, the transaction is created. Creating this transaction is slightly more complex than the list-modules transaction you learned about in the previous chapter.

Instead of passing raw Pact code as a string to Pact.builder.execution(), the coin['transferCreate'] function is called on Pact.modules to generate the correct Pact code for you, based on the typing information you generated in the previous step, combined with the arguments provided to the function. The third argument of transfer-create is a function that returns the guard for the account to be created. This guard is specified in .addData(), with the public key of the admin account as the only key and keys-all as the predicate. This guard associates the created account with the public key of your admin account, for which you hold the private key in Chainweaver, to make sure that only you will be able to control the account. In .addSigner(), it is specified that the sender needs to sign off for the capability to pay the gas fee for the transaction and to make the transfer with the provided details. In .setMeta(), sender00 is specified as the senderAccount. After setting the network id from the Devnet configuration, the transaction is created. Next, the transaction is signed with the private key of the sender00 account and the transaction is submitted. Open up a terminal window with the current directory set to the ./snippets folder. Run the following command to create and fund your admin account. Replace k:account with your admin account.

After a few seconds, Write succeeded should be printed in the terminal window. Verify that your account was created by checking the account details using the Kadena JavaScript client. Replace k:account with your admin account.

This time, the script should print out the account name, the KDA balance and the receiver guard of the account. Chainweaver will tell the same story. Navigate to Accounts in the top section of the left menu bar. Expand your admin account to view the information on all chains. You will see that on chain 1 you are the owner, one keyset is defined and the balance is 20 KDA.

In this chapter you learned how to create a key for a Kadena account using Chainweaver and to create and fund this account using the Kadena JavaScript client. You verified the creation of the account in Accounts view of Chainweaver and by calling the details function of the coin module on Devnet using the Kadena JavaScript client. The admin user will use its KDA to pay gas fees charged for deploying keysets, deploying smart contract modules and sending transactions to nominate candidates for the election. In the following chapter you will learn how to create a namespace in which you will later define an admin keyset and deploy your smart contracts.