ada-wallet-cli

A standalone CLI wallet for Cardano. Manage wallets, check balances, transfer ADA and native assets, run a local devnet, and settle two-party atomic swaps — all from the terminal.

Built for two audiences: developers starting a Cardano project who want a funded wallet on a local chain in under five minutes, and AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP client) using the same primitives through a built-in MCP server.

Status: early. The devnet and chain-query commands work — localnet, tip, info, config. Wallets, transfers, assets and swaps are next. Nothing is published to npm yet. See docs/COMMANDS.md for the designed surface and tasks/IMPLEMENTATION.md for the feature checklist and current status.

Why this exists

Cardano has excellent tooling, but it is spread across four projects with four interfaces: a devnet manager, a node CLI that is not a wallet, a separate address tool, and a wallet daemon. Getting from nothing to "I sent a transaction and can see why it failed" means learning all of them.

This is one umbrella over the good parts. It does not reimplement them — it composes them, and adds the pieces nobody ships: transfers between arbitrary addresses, native-asset bundles, atomic swaps, and a single agent-callable surface over the lot.

Related MCP server: agenti

Planned commands

Working today: localnet, tip, info, config, help. Run ada help for the current list — it marks which commands are implemented.

Installing will provide two binaries: ada and ada-mcp.

How it works

• docs/STACK.md — start here. What every piece in the stack is, who makes it, and why it is there. Yaci DevKit, Yaci Store, MeshJS, cardano-node, and the two APIs the local chain serves.

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — how our own code is arranged, and a command traced end to end.

• docs/DEVNET.md — running the local chain, and diagnosing it when it will not start.

Built on

Deliberately composed rather than written from scratch:

• MeshJS — wallet, transaction building, native assets, multi-signature co-signing. The headless server-side wallet is what makes a CLI possible without a browser extension.

• Yaci DevKit — the local devnet: one-second blocks, a faucet, a bundled Blockfrost-compatible indexer, and multi-node mode for rollback testing.

• cardano-address — derivation and address ground truth.

MCP server

ada-mcp exposes the wallet operations as tools, so an agent can fund a wallet, send a transfer, and read back the result without a human copying commands between a terminal and a chat window.

Yaci DevKit ships its own MCP server for chain operations — devnet lifecycle, faucet, rollback. The two are complementary and do not overlap: theirs owns the chain, this one owns the wallet.

License

Apache-2.0