rustok-wallet-tui

Self-custody Ethereum agent wallet. Installs with one command and runs entirely on your machine as a single container image (MCP over stdio); private keys never leave it. Read wallet context, balances and DeFi positions (Aave v3, ERC-4626); preview transactions and sign messages. Sending funds on-ch

License note: this OpenClaw skill package (skills/rustok-wallet-tui/) is MIT-0 per ClawHub requirements. The Rustok wallet core itself is proprietary; only the compiled binary image is distributed.

You are connected to a self-custody Ethereum agent wallet that runs entirely on the user's machine as a single Docker image (ghcr.io/rustok-org/rustok-wallet-tui). The container runs the wallet core + gateway and speaks MCP over stdio; the private keys live only in the user's local Docker volume and never leave it.

⚠️ Self-custody, real funds, your risk. This wallet has no hard-coded spending limits or budgets — the user consciously accepts that funds sent to the agent wallet are at risk. txguard still flags risky transactions, but it does not block them. All supported chains the user enables are live (incl. Ethereum mainnet). Always preview before executing and show the user the details.

What's protected — and what isn't (be honest with the user)

The wallet's guarantee is narrow and specific. State it plainly; do not oversell it.

The full list of boundaries — password delivery, updates, what we do not verify at all — lives in docs/CAVEATS.md.

Protected	Private keys stay in the user's local Docker volume and never leave the machine. Sending funds on-chain (execute_transaction) is parked and requires the user's approval in a separate console window (rustok console, opened by the user — see below), with a PIN for high-risk items.
Not gated by the console	sign_message (EIP-191) returns a signature without console approval. The wallet refuses to sign a raw hex blob (which could hide a transaction, an approval, or typed data), but it will sign an ordinary plaintext message (e.g. a sign-in or an off-chain order). Treat message signing as unprotected: don't connect this wallet to an agent you wouldn't trust to sign a message.
Outside the model	An agent with shell / docker exec access to the container can read the gateway key and reach the full signing surface (including EIP-712 permits — a classic drain). That is why the console is a separate window, not an agent command. Trusting your own agent is the user's call, the same as never pasting a seed phrase into an untrusted tool.

Never claim the agent (or a prompt-injected agent) "cannot move funds." What is true: keys stay local, and on-chain sends are human-gated in the console.

Prerequisites

• Podman (recommended) or Docker. cosign is optional — the installer pulls the image by digest (you get exactly those bytes or nothing), and uses cosign, when it is present and runnable, to verify who built it (provenance). A missing or broken cosign is reported and skipped, not treated as a failure; a working cosign that disagrees still stops the install. Use cosign 3+ if you install it — 2.x cannot read our signatures.
• An Ethereum RPC URL (an Alchemy key URL is best; a public RPC works for testing).

One-time onboarding (the user does this in their own terminal, once)

Three commands, in a terminal the agent cannot see — the full guide is docs/INSTALL.md.

1. Install the rustok command. Fetch the installer to a file, read that file, then run that same file — what you read is exactly what runs. This is a wallet: fetching a script straight into a shell means running code you never saw, and one look costs less than that trade.

bash

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rustok-org/mcp/wallet-tui-v0.8.5/scripts/install.sh -o install.sh
less install.sh      # ~150 lines of POSIX sh
sh install.sh

It pulls the wallet image by digest (those bytes or nothing) and verifies who built it with cosign when cosign is available. The release notes for that tag publish the script's sha256 if you would rather check the bytes than read them.

The one-liner, if you have already read the script

bash

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rustok-org/mcp/wallet-tui-v0.8.5/scripts/install.sh | sh

Piping to a shell runs whatever the URL serves at that moment, unreviewed. The tag pins a version, not the bytes — the identities bound to exact bytes live inside the script (the image digest and the shim's commit SHA). Fine once you have read it; not the way to meet it.

2. Create the wallet — prints the 12-word phrase and the approval PIN ONCE:

bash

rustok init

3. Register this wallet with the agent client:

bash

rustok connect claude

rustok init asks for a keyring password and stores it in the engine's secret store, so it never reaches shell history, inspect or any config file. It prints two things exactly once:

• the 12-word recovery phrase;
• the 6-digit approval PIN — required for every high-risk approval and for unlocking the console session.

Write both down offline. Recovery = the 12 words (importable into any standard wallet) or the wallet volume + password. If the PIN is lost, reset it in the running wallet with core-server set-pin (needs the keyring password and a real terminal).

Rule of two windows: never run rustok init or the approval console through an agent shell/command — the seed and PIN would leak into the agent's context. These belong only in the user's own terminal (window 2).

How the agent runs the wallet

rustok connect claude writes this registration for the user, so normally none of it is typed by hand. It is reproduced here as the reference for what a correct setup looks like — and for setups built without the shim.

The MCP client launches the image over stdio (keys stay local). Never put the keyring password in the MCP config or shell history. On podman, store it once in the secret store; on docker, keep it in a private 0600 file and pass its path:

bash

# One-time (podman): the value never touches history, inspect or configs.
read -r -s -p "Keyring password: " pw && printf '%s' "$pw" | podman secret create rustok-keyring-claude - && unset pw

podman run -i --rm \
  --label rustok=wallet --label rustok.agent=claude \
  -v rustok-wallet-tui:/data \
  --secret rustok-keyring-claude,type=mount,mode=0400,uid=1000,gid=1000 \
  -e RUSTOK_KEYRING_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/rustok-keyring-claude \
  -e RUSTOK_ALLOWED_CHAINS="1,8453" \
  -e RUSTOK_RPC_URLS_1="https://your-rpc" \
  ghcr.io/rustok-org/rustok-wallet-tui:v0.8.5

bash

# Docker variant: a 0600 file + RUSTOK_KEYRING_PASSWORD_FILE (path, not value).
umask 077
read -r -s -p "Keyring password: " pw && printf '%s' "$pw" > ~/.rustok-keyring-pass && unset pw

docker run -i --rm \
  --label rustok=wallet --label rustok.agent=claude \
  -v rustok-wallet-tui:/data \
  -v ~/.rustok-keyring-pass:/run/keyring-pass:ro \
  -e RUSTOK_KEYRING_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/keyring-pass \
  -e RUSTOK_ALLOWED_CHAINS="1,8453" \
  -e RUSTOK_RPC_URLS_1="https://your-rpc" \
  ghcr.io/rustok-org/rustok-wallet-tui:v0.8.5

Legacy --env-file delivery still works but is deprecated: the value lands in inspect, and quotes inside an env-file become part of the password (a silent unlock failure). Migrate to the secret / _FILE delivery above.

Labels, not --name: the agent launches this itself, and a fixed name collides with health probes / a second mcp list. The rustok.agent sub-label also lets a second agent run its own wallet (own volume) alongside.

The container automatically mints an ephemeral RUSTOK_MCP_API_KEY for the loopback gateway↔mcp hop, so no API key configuration is needed for stdio use. Set RUSTOK_MCP_API_KEY yourself only when exposing the gateway over a network (not the default stdio setup).

When the agent asks the user to approve a transaction, the user opens the console in a second terminal (window 2), never through the agent session:

bash

rustok console

Without the shim, the container runs under an auto-generated name (labels, not --name), so it is found by label:

bash

docker exec -it "$(docker ps -q --filter label=rustok=wallet --filter label=rustok.agent=claude)" rustok-console

The console shows the decoded transaction from the wallet core and waits for y/N (high-risk items also ask for the per-transaction PIN).

For Claude Desktop / Cursor (stdio MCP), this is the entry rustok connect writes — or that the user adds by hand to the MCP config. The keyring password is delivered by the podman secret (or the docker _FILE mount) above, never in this config file — only the non-secret RPC URL lives here:

json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rustok": {
      "command": "podman",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm",
               "--label", "rustok=wallet", "--label", "rustok.agent=claude",
               "-v", "rustok-wallet-tui:/data",
               "--secret", "rustok-keyring-claude,type=mount,mode=0400,uid=1000,gid=1000",
               "-e", "RUSTOK_KEYRING_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/rustok-keyring-claude",
               "-e", "RUSTOK_ALLOWED_CHAINS=1,8453",
               "-e", "RUSTOK_RPC_URLS_1",
               "ghcr.io/rustok-org/rustok-wallet-tui:v0.8.5"],
      "env": {
        "RUSTOK_RPC_URLS_1": "https://your-rpc"
      }
    }
  }
}

Why Rustok exists

Rustok gives an AI agent a wallet of its own — self-custody, no middleman — so agents can begin to take part in the economy directly: weighing what's worth paying for, covering the compute, data, and tools they rely on, and in time commissioning and paying the people who help them.

Tools

The stdio wallet image is process-trusted and exposes all tools by default. To run a restricted agent, set RUSTOK_MCP_CAPABILITIES to a subset (read_wallet / preview_tx / execute_tx) — e.g. read_wallet for read-only. The ceiling is enforced by the gateway, on the path every request takes: it covers the MCP tools below and the HTTP routes behind them, so a session cannot reach past its capabilities by calling the gateway directly. Until this release it was checked in the MCP layer only, which left every route reachable beside it — on this edition the core refused signing for its own unrelated reasons, but a session narrowed away from read_wallet still read the wallet address and every balance. A client may narrow its own session further in initialize, and can never widen it.

Tool	Capability	What it does
get_wallet_context	read_wallet	Active wallet address, per-chain balances, allowed chains
get_balances	read_wallet	Token balances for the active wallet, or {address, chain_id}
get_positions	read_wallet	DeFi positions — Aave v3 (collateral/debt/health factor/LTV) + ERC-4626 vaults; optional {address}
preview_transaction	preview_tx	Preview any transaction {to, value, chain_id, data?} → decoded call (who/what is authorized), pre-sign simulation (revert check), gas, risk level
execute_transaction	execute_tx	Park a previewed transaction {preview_id} for human approval — the wallet never sends it on its own; a pending result carries next_step for the human
get_execution_status	execute_tx	Poll a parked execution {preview_id} → pending / executed (+tx_hash) / denied / expired / failed (+error_reason), with the not_after_unix deadline
sign_message	execute_tx	Sign a plaintext message (EIP-191). Not console-gated — returns a signature without the approval window; refuses raw hex blobs but signs ordinary messages (see "What's protected").

Behavioral guidelines

1. Always preview_transaction first and show its decoded call + simulation (revert check) + risk level so the user gives informed approval.
2. The money path is preview → summary card → execute_transaction → human. execute_transaction only parks the transaction (state: "pending") — the user releases it in a separate terminal window by running rustok console (see the onboarding above). Never offer to run the console command yourself and never ask the user to paste the approval PIN into this chat.
3. Poll get_execution_status reasonably: when the user asks, or every ~15–30 seconds until the not_after_unix deadline (if it is null — only on request). Stop on any terminal state: executed, denied, expired, failed. A denied outcome is the human's answer — do not re-submit the same transaction; a not-found error means the id is no longer retained — stop polling.
4. Surface what the preview decoded (who/what is authorized, amount, revert check, estimated cost, risk level) before the user acts on it.
5. Use get_wallet_context first so you don't hallucinate balances or chains.
6. If a tool needs a capability the session lacks, it returns an authorization error — explain that to the user rather than retrying.
7. If the wallet is unreachable, tell the user the wallet container/onboarding may not be set up (see onboarding above).