The Web3 developer’s EVM Swiss Army Knife

Andrei Popa

October 20, 2023

At Chainstack we aim to provide Web3 developers with all the tools that they need in order to build their DApps. Being builders ourselves, we felt the need to put all the useful tools that a Web3 developer uses, under one roof. This is how we came about making what we like to call the EVM Swiss Army Knife.

What is the EVM Swiss Army Knife

It is a suite of mini-tools built for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developers. It is composed of smart contract event tools, Solidity calldata tools, Converters & more.

You can find a brief description of each tool below, along with a link to it, so that you can jump ahead and use it.

Smart contract event tools

Generate event signature tool

An event signature is a unique identifier for a specific event emitted by a smart contract on the blockchain. These signatures are generated using a formula that takes into account the event name and its emitted data types.

Generate event

Specifically, the event signature is produced by hashing the event’s name and parameter types with Keccak-256.

Encode event topics tool

An event topic is a 32-byte representation of an event parameter. Encode a topic to use it to retrieve logs when querying your Chainstack node.

Encode topics

Learn how to retrieve event logs using the eth_getLogs method on the Chainstack developer portal.

Solidity calldata tools

Generate Solidity functions signature tool

In Web3 and Solidity, calldata refers to the input data that is sent along a transaction when an account is interacting with a smart contract and calling its functions. The first 4 bytes of calldata represent the function’s signature.

Generate function

Learn how the encoding process work following the How to encode calldata parameters to programmatically interact with a smart contract recipe on the Chainstack developer portal.

Encode calldata parameters

Parameters passed to the function in calldata are represented as 32 bytes of data.

Encode calldata

Learn how the encoding process work following the How to encode calldata parameters to programmatically interact with a smart contract recipe in the Chainstack developer portal.

Smart contract source code and ABI tool

Input a smart contract address to retrieve its source code and ABI. Note that the contract must be verified.

Fetch source and ABI

Find an example of a verified smart contract on Etherscan.

Conversion tools

Decimal, Hex, and Ethereum Units conversion tools

Decimal to Hex

Hex to Decimal

Ethereum Units

Keccak-256 hashing tool

Keccak-256 is a cryptographic hash function that generates a unique, fixed-size string of bytes for each unique input it receives. This feature makes it useful for ensuring data integrity, as any change in the input data leads to a different hash output. It’s virtually impossible to derive the original input from the hash output, making it a one-way function.

Hash Keccak-256

Find a list of examples where Keccak-256 is used in the Chainstack developer portal.

Checksum address tool

A checksummed address is a standard Ethereum address with certain characters capitalized to include a checksum validation. Checksumming is a way of having error-detection codes in an Ethereum address. Checksumming aims to prevent errors when an address is typed manually.

Checksum address

Find more about checksum in Ethereum in the Chainstack developer portal.