Finding about native token of a parachain

Question

Is there a way to query whether a chain has a native token and what it is?

For instance can I query Moonbeam, to find that it's native token is GLMR(Glimmer). Similarly for the rest of the parachains.

Answer 1

You have this information in the chain-spec of the network, if you want to query it, you can use RPC queries for it.

Specifically the system_properties RPC call

You can query it using CURL:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"id":1, "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method": "system_properties", "params": []}' https://moonbeam.public.blastapi.io

And you will get the token symbol of the network, GLMR in this case.

{"SS58Prefix":1284,"tokenDecimals":18,"tokenSymbol":"GLMR"},"id":1

Or you can use JS code, with PolkadotJS library.

const wsProvider = new WsProvider('wss://moonbeam.public.blastapi.io');
const api = await ApiPromise.create({ provider: wsProvider });
const properties = await api.rpc.system.properties();
console.log(properties.toHuman());

And you got the token symbol:

{
  ss58Format: null,
  tokenDecimals: [ '18' ],
  tokenSymbol: [ 'GLMR' ],
  SS58Prefix: 1284
}

Answer 2

You can also use Sidecar's endpoint runtime/spec. So you would need to :

• Install Sidecar locally
• Add an .env file that points to one of Moonbeam's public endpoints, e.g. wss://moonbeam.api.onfinality.io/public-ws (unless you are running a parachain node yourself)
• Run Sidecar with your new env profile as shown in the README
• Then you can access the endpoint from your browser http://127.0.0.1:8080/runtime/spec
• The result is again in JSON format

    {
  "at": {
    "height": "2316673",
    "hash": "0xafdd015b8b04c039d5e6753cf9363e57a9a65ac5127a62b525b57761fc14533e"
  },
  "authoringVersion": "3",
  "transactionVersion": "2",
  "implVersion": "0",
  "specName": "moonbeam",
  "specVersion": "1803",
  "chainType": {
    "live": null
  },
  "properties": {
    "ss58Format": null,
    "tokenDecimals": [
      "18"
    ],
    "tokenSymbol": [
      "GLMR"
    ],
    "SS58Prefix": "1284"
  }
}