Networks & RPC

Canonical keeps a list of networks it knows about and points at one of them at a time — the "active" one. That is the network it reviews against, sends on, and reads balances from. This page is about switching networks, adding your own, and pointing at your own node.

A fresh wallet is pointed at a network called Chunknet (it shows up as 0x34622 in status). It is a placeholder, not somewhere you want to move real money. Until you switch, nothing works against Ethereum, Base, or a testnet. So the first thing to do is look, then switch:

wallet chains list                      # what's available, and which is active
wallet chains switch --chain-id 0x1     # Ethereum (or a test network to start)

Out of the box you have:

switch takes either form — the plain number or the short 0x... one. If you ask for a network it does not know, it says so; add it first.

chains add registers a network with the addresses you give it and checks that they work:

wallet chains add \
  --chain-id 8453 \
  --name "Base (my node)" \
  --rpc-url https://my-base-node.internal \
  --rpc-url https://mainnet.base.org

A few notes:

• The wallet tests the URLs when you add them and remembers what it found.
• If no network is active yet, the one you just added becomes active.
• List the address you trust most first — that is the one it will lean on.
• To point an existing network at your node, just add it again with your URL.

Depending on your rules, chains add or chains switch might come back with governance_required. That means changing networks is a guarded action for you, and you route it through a proposal instead:

wallet proposal add-chain ...
wallet proposal switch-chain ...

Those take the usual two-person approval. The simple rule: try the direct command; if it says governance_required, use the proposal version. Do not try to guess which is allowed — let the wallet tell you.

The wallet can look things up on-chain for you — balances, logs, contract reads — through a short, safe list of read-only requests. If you need to widen or narrow that list, you can, by dropping a small config file in your data folder. The one firm rule: it only ever allows reading. Anything that could send a transaction or change state is off the table by design.

Lots of things need a network selected — reviewing, sending, checking balances. If you get an error about no active network, run wallet chains switch first.