Improving the Cycle Management Experience

Developers Command Line Tools
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Hi everyone!

A major pain point for developers is cycle management (“Removal of Cycles Wallet” is currently at the number-2 spot on the DX feedback board).

We’d like to pick up work on this topic soon but would like to collect some community feedback first, of course.

We currently envision the following change to dfx: A new subcommand (tentatively called) cycles would be introduced that enables you to check the cycles balance of your principal ID (dfx cycles balance). This new subcommand can also be used to transfer cycles to another principal ID or to any canister.
Naturally, it would also be possible to increase the cycles balance using ICP.

A promising approach to implement this functionality is the introduction of a cycles ledger, which would adhere to the ICRC-1 (and probably also the ICRC-2) standard.
There seems to be interest in such a ledger in general as the topic was brought up again recently on the forum.

Note that the cycles wallet will continue to exist for those who wish to use it. The cycles wallet can be used to call other canisters with cycles attached. A global cycles ledger would not have this functionality.

If you have any requests, questions, or feedback about this feature, please share them here!

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I currently use the cycle token xtc for all my cycle needs. It would be cool if I could just keep doing that but with an ICRC token. We just need better documentations so new people know about the token.

We don’t need more dfx commands. Dfx is already complicated enough.

Maybe a redesign.

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The process should be very similar, one of the differences being that the new ledger would be ICRC-1/2 compliant.
And yes, we will definitely try to create good/better documentation. :slight_smile:

This activity can be considered part of a redesign (rather than adding more stuff on top) to make cycle management more user-friendly.

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A nice gui and a way to bind it all to my internet identity would be really nice. And some oauth type things so I can write cli tools that people can just plug into their dfx identity.

The ability for me to customize my own tools would be much more powerful than you guys trying to guess my needs.

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