Turn balance-tx into a CLI tool

[abailly]

As part of the general strategy to extracts components used in cardano-wallet who could potentially be useful in other settings, we want to research whether or not balance-tx would be a good fit.

[abailly]

Summary of 2025-02-28 discussion:

• very different target w/ web framework
• how do you build transactions?
  • builder pattern, add parts to the tx through helper functions
  • make it easy to add things but not necessarily correct
• in Elm -> inspired by Purescript DSL library
  • tool for frontend users
• who will be users?
  • power tool for CLI users? -> developers?
• write some Yaml/JSON intentions, grab multiple transactions
  • paolo would use it
  • abstract the details of each blockchain (?)
• balance-tx -> only does balancing w/o connecting to the node
  • functionality: Utxo + tx -> tx
  • performance?
• game changer wallet -> https://gamechanger.finance/
  • "wallet for merchants"
  • express txs w/ JSON
• CLI tool based on intents
• vision:
  • cardano-addresses can generate all resources needed for a pool gap
  • kupo indexes data from chain
  • use addresses to create transactions
  • use pool of resources to decode transaction
  • submit through cardano-cli
  • set of tools talking to each other
• visualisation of a tx
• people/devs aren't really looking for something to balance tx
  • does not seem like a pain point
  • looking at tooling and ledger, pain points
• signing a transaction == signing the intent of the transaction
• https://saib.dev is developing a wallet: https://x.com/saibdev/status/1889819254301802941ns

[abailly]

A very simple scenario for using balance-tx as a CLI

Extract utxo I can spend:

cardano-cli conway query utxo --address addr123123 --json > utxo.json

Assume there's a tx.json file containing a transaction to balance in Envelope format, then we could do:

balance-tx --transaction tx.json --utxo utxo.json > tx.balanced.json