Cycles Management

This handles the unglamorous but critical work of keeping canisters funded and alive on Internet Computer. It covers checking cycle balances, accepting and sending cycles between canisters, setting freezing thresholds, and creating new canisters programmatically through the management canister. The code examples show both Motoko and Rust patterns for accepting payment cycles and topping up other canisters. One thing worth knowing: the skill assumes you're using icp-cli with the cycles ledger, not the legacy wallet system. The examples are practical, like how to avoid silently running out of cycles or accidentally sending them to the wrong canister with no way to get them back. If you're building anything that needs to manage its own funding or spawn child canisters, you'll need these patterns.

skills.sh installs: 307
GitHub stars: 39
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add dfinity/icskills --skill cycles-management --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

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 is eventually uninstalled -- its code and data are deleted, but its metadata (canister ID, controllers, settings) survives. 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.