Cycles & Canister Management

What This Is

Cycles are the computation fuel for canisters on Internet Computer. Every canister operation (execution, storage, messaging) burns cycles. When a canister runs out of cycles, it freezes and eventually gets deleted. 1 trillion cycles (1T) costs approximately 1 USD equivalent in ICP (the exact rate is set by the NNS and fluctuates with ICP price via the CMC).

Note: icp-cli uses the cycles ledger (um5iw-rqaaa-aaaaq-qaaba-cai) by default. The cycles ledger is a single canister that tracks cycle balances for all principals, similar to a token ledger. Commands like icp cycles balance, icp cycles mint, and icp canister top-up go through the cycles ledger. There is no legacy wallet concept in icp-cli. The programmatic patterns below (accepting cycles, creating canisters via management canister) remain the same regardless of which funding mechanism is used.

Prerequisites

• icp-cli >= 0.1.0 (install: brew install dfinity/tap/icp-cli)
• An identity with ICP balance for converting to cycles (mainnet)
• For local development: cycles are unlimited by default

Canister IDs