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A guided walkthrough of the gen CLI. You’ll create an account, fund it, move money, deploy a contract you didn’t write, and expose your handiwork to an AI agent — all on a chain whose activation price is quoted in stablecoin cents, not native token, and whose validators have been benchmarked at over 1,000,000 activations per second.
How this works. Every state-changing step prints a Receipt so you see the cost and latency budget as you go. By the end of the curriculum you’ll have done a handful of activations and spent well under a cent.

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The lessons

Every lesson has a CLI tab and a Rust SDK tab. Pick the environment you’ll build in; the other stays out of your way.
#ChapterTimeWhat it teaches
—Environment setup5 minInstall the gen toolchain — native macOS binaries (recommended) or devcontainer.
1Your first account5 minwallet create / wallet show. Identity is local-first: a key generates an address with zero on-chain footprint.
2Fund from the faucet3 minwallet faucet. The first activation Alice ever participates in — and the first Receipt.
3Local → DevNet in one flag3 min--rpc-url + auth header. Same commands, same SDK code, different chain.
4Transfer between accounts7 minThe one workflow that powers every write on the Grid — build-activation → sign-and-submit-activation.
5Deploy a contract from ABI10 minclient push / deploy / install. Three activations get you from the simple-token artifacts you built in Contract Development to a live, callable contract.
6Call your contract8 minclient view (free reads) + the activation pattern (paid writes). The whole call surface in two lines of a table.

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The Receipt: your running cost budget

Every state-changing step prints a Receipt:
1 activation · 0.001¢ USDG · ~10 ms · Same price next month: fees are quoted in stablecoin, not native token.
End-to-end the curriculum is ~18 activations and under two cents.

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Where the SDK boundary sits

Not everything is in the Rust SDK (v0.13.0):
In the SDKOn the CLI only
get-account, get-balance, get-component, get-contract, view, build-activation, sign-and-submit-activationWallet creation/keystore, faucet, push / deploy / install (one-time setup steps)
Rust apps shell out to gen for the CLI-only ops at boot, then use the SDK for everything from get-account onward.

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What you’ll need

  • A Unix-like shell (macOS or Linux; WSL2 on Windows).
  • The gen binary on your PATH. (macOS bundle: drag from the release tarball into /usr/local/bin/gen.)
  • jq for the few JSON-shaping moments. (brew install jq)
  • About 50 minutes.
For the optional Rust-SDK examples woven through lessons 3, 4, and 6: gen-rpc-client + gen-rpc-wire v0.13.0 from gen-bc/gen-framework-preview, via Cargo.

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DevNet endpoint

When you graduate from local to the shared network in lesson 3:
  • RPC URL · <DEVNET_RPC_URL>
  • Auth · GEN_DEVNET_BEARER_TOKEN (or GEN_DEVNET_AUTHORIZATION), sent as the authorization: Bearer <jwt> header.
Get a token from your Gen Labs contact.

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Claim to fame

Three properties that don’t tend to coexist on the same chain. Numbers, not adjectives:
PropertyWhat the Grid doesWhat this enables
Cost stabilityFees quoted and paid in USDG centsAn agent doing 1,000 transfers/day spends 1¢/day — a number that doesn’t move next quarter
On-chain identityStorage priced per byte-monthThe full ERC-8004 record (metadata, capabilities, reputation, certificates) lives on-chain; no CDN, no IPFS, no “trust whoever’s hosting the metadata today”
Throughput as a non-issue~100 ms blocks, 1,000,000 activations/sec design targetPer-HTTP-request, per-agent-thought, per-keystroke on-chain footprints are routine; the chain is not your bottleneck
Throughput and latency figures are design targets the architecture is engineered to hit sustainably, not measured benchmarks on a specific deployment.

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Start here

Environment setup

Step 1 · 5 min. Install the gen toolchain — native macOS binaries or devcontainer.

Your first account

Step 2 · 5 min. Two commands to a working on-chain identity. Zero activations spent.