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Send tokens with messages

Call a contract on chain B from chain A and attach some tokens

To call chain B from chain A and send some tokens along the way, the user needs to call callContractWithToken on the gateway of chain A, specifying:

  • The destination chain: must be an EVM chain from Chain names.
  • The destination contract address: must implement the IAxelarExecutable interface defined in IAxelarExecutable.sol.
  • The payload bytes to pass to the destination contract.
  • The symbol of the token to transfer: must be a supported asset [Mainnet | Testnet | Testnet-2].
  • The amount of the token to transfer.

As per snippet below.

function callContractWithToken(
    string memory destinationChain,
    string memory contractAddress,
    bytes memory payload,
    string memory symbol,
    uint256 amount
) external;

IAxelarExecutable has an _executeWithToken function that will be triggered by the Axelar network after the callContractWithToken function has been executed. You can write any custom logic there.

The destination contract will be authorized to transfer the ERC-20 identified by the tokenSymbol.

function _executeWithToken(
    string memory sourceChain,
    string memory sourceAddress,
    bytes calldata payload,
    string memory tokenSymbol,
    uint256 amount
) internal virtual {}

Example

Suppose our destination contract wants to forward the token it received to a recipient provided in the payload. It could be done this way.

function _executeWithToken(
    string memory sourceChain,
    string memory sourceAddress,
    bytes calldata payload,
    string memory tokenSymbol,
    uint256 amount
) internal virtual {
    // decode recipient
    address memory recipient = abi.decode(payload, (address));
    // get ERC-20 address from gateway
    address tokenAddress = gateway.tokenAddresses(tokenSymbol);

    // transfer received tokens to the recipient
    IERC20(tokenAddress).transfer(recipient, amount);
}

*** Ensure the payload is encoded bytes.

The payload passed to callContract (and ultimately to the _execute and _executeWithToken) has type bytes. Use the ABI encoder/decoder convert your data to bytes.

Example of payload encoding in JavaScript (using ethers.js):

const { ethers } = require("ethers");

// encoding a string
const payload = ethers.utils.defaultAbiCoder.encode(
  ["string"],
  ["Hello from contract A"]
);

Example of payload decoding in Solidity:

function _execute(
    string memory sourceChain,
    string memory sourceAddress,
    bytes calldata payload
) internal override {
    // decoding a string
    string memory _message = abi.decode(payload, (string));
}
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