cardano-c is a C library aiming to be a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured toolkit for building transaction and interacting with the Cardano blockchain. Its compliant with the MISRA 2012 standard, and was designed with a binding-friendly architecture to enable easy integrations across various programming languages.
Ready to learn? Get the latest documentation at cardano-c.readthedocs.io or jump to code examples!
- Address Parsing & Generation
- Ed25519 Cryptography
- Transaction Serialization & Deserialization
- Powerful Transaction Builder
- Robust C99 implementation
- Layered architecture offers both control and convenience
- Flexible memory management
- No shared global state - threading friendly
- Proper handling of UTF-8
- Extensive documentation and test suite
- It has no runtime dependencies (The library depends on libsodium, libjsonc and libgmp, but they are all statically linked)
This is a basic cardano-c example, it sends LOVELACE_TO_SEND coins to RECEIVING_ADDRESS. Check full example at send lovelace.
// 2 hours from now in UNIX time (seconds)
const uint64_t invalid_after = cardano_utils_get_time() + SECONDS_IN_TWO_HOURS;
// 1.- Build transaction
cardano_tx_builder_t* tx_builder = cardano_tx_builder_new(protocol_params, provider);
cardano_tx_builder_set_utxos(tx_builder, utxo_list);
cardano_tx_builder_set_change_address(tx_builder, payment_address);
cardano_tx_builder_set_invalid_after_ex(tx_builder, invalid_after);
cardano_tx_builder_send_lovelace_ex(tx_builder, RECEIVING_ADDRESS, cardano_utils_safe_strlen(RECEIVING_ADDRESS, 128), LOVELACE_TO_SEND);
cardano_transaction_t* transaction = NULL;
cardano_error_t result = cardano_tx_builder_build(tx_builder, &transaction);
if (result != CARDANO_SUCCESS)
{
console_error("Failed to build transaction");
console_error("Error [%d]: %s", result, cardano_error_to_string(result));
console_error("%s", cardano_tx_builder_get_last_error(tx_builder));
return result;
}
// 2.- Sign transaction
sign_transaction(key_handler, SIGNER_DERIVATION_PATH, transaction);
// 3.- Submit transaction & confirm
submit_transaction(provider, CONFIRM_TX_TIMEOUT_MS, transaction);Cardano-C supports all features up to the Conway era, which is the current era of the Cardano blockchain. Conway era brought to Cardano decentralized governance. You can see some of the governance related examples in the examples directory:
- Register as DRep (PubKey)
- Register as DRep (Script)
- Submit governance action proposal (Withdrawing from treasury)
- Vote for proposal (PubKey DRep)
- Vote for proposal (Script DRep)
These are some of the examples illustrated in the examples directory. However, you should be able to build any valid transaction for the current era. See the Documentation for more information.
The Cardano C library uses a simple reference-counting model. The main goal is that the library can be easily integrated into applications and languages that uses different memory management models (such as garbage collection).
Every object in our library provides functions to increase and decrease its reference count. For instance, you would use cardano_cbor_writer_ref to increase and cardano_cbor_writer_unref to decrease the reference count for a cardano_cbor_writer_t object.
Upon creation through constructors like cardano_cbor_writer_new, an object's reference count is initialized to one.
This implies that the caller becomes the sole owner of the newly created reference.
When the reference count drops to zero—typically when the *_unref function is invoked by the last entity
holding a reference—the object gets deallocated.
Note that all getter functions will consistently increment the reference count of the object they return. Thus, it's the caller's responsibility to invoke *_unref once they're done using the result.
After cloning the repository run the following command in the repository root:
git config core.hooksPath .githooksRepository comes with always-up-to-date .clang-format file, an input configuration
for clang-format tool (version 15.x is a minimum).
This project uses Google test framework for writing unit tests.
Start by installing the gtest development package:
sudo apt-get install libgtest-devNote that this package only install source files. You have to compile the code yourself to create the necessary library files.
These source files should be located at /usr/src/googletest.
cd $(mktemp -d)
cmake /usr/src/googletest
make
sudo make installTo generate the documentation for this project, we utilize Doxygen for source code processing, Breathe to integrate Doxygen content with Sphinx, and Sphinx to compile the entire documentation into a web-friendly format.
-
Install Python 3 and pip: Required for Sphinx and Breathe. Most Linux distributions include Python 3 by default. For Windows, download from the Python website, ensuring you add Python to your PATH.
Linux example (Ubuntu):
sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
-
Install Sphinx and Breathe: These Python packages are installed via pip. Breathe bridges Doxygen-generated XML with Sphinx for seamless documentation integration. Additionally, the Sphinx Immaterial theme is installed for a modern web design.
pip install sphinx sphinx-immaterial breathe
-
Install Doxygen: Necessary for generating XML files from source code. Install via your Linux package manager or download from the Doxygen website for Windows.
Linux example (Ubuntu):
sudo apt-get install doxygen
After setting up your environment, generate the project's documentation by navigating to the repository root and executing:
cmake -DDOXYGEN_ENABLED=ON .
make docThe generated documentation will be available at build/release/doc/html/index.html, providing a comprehensive guide to the project's API and architecture.
We welcome contributions from the community. Please read our CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.