Solana - How to get token balance for a foreign account?

Question

In Solana you can get your own balance with the CLI

$ spl-token accounts

But how do I get the token balance of a foreign account if I have the account ID or his pubkey? When I use the solana explorer I can see the information I need when I search for the foreign account ID and then click on the Tokens tab (next to "History"): https://explorer.solana.com/address/DNuqHBGxzm96VLkLWCUctjYW9CX68DBY6jQ1cVuYP2Ai/tokens?cluster=devnet

So if the explorer website can do it, everybody can, all info on the blockchain is public, right?

Answer 1

That's right, everything is indeed public, so if you want to get the balance for someone else's account, you can simply use getBalance if it's SOL (https://docs.solana.com/developing/clients/jsonrpc-api#getbalance) or getTokenAccountBalance if it's an SPL Token account (https://docs.solana.com/developing/clients/jsonrpc-api#gettokenaccountbalance).

Answer 2

Following code worked to get the balance for SOL after Jon Cinque's answer (maybe helpful for others or future me):

const web3 = require("@solana/web3.js");
const { Keypair, Transaction, SystemProgram, LAMPORTS_PER_SOL, sendAndConfirmTransaction, clusterApiUrl } = require("@solana/web3.js");

let secretKey = Uint8Array.from([233, 65, ... (rest of my secret)]);

let fromKeypair = Keypair.fromSecretKey(secretKey);

let connection = new web3.Connection(clusterApiUrl('devnet'));

(async () => {

    const balance = await connection.getBalance(
        fromKeypair.publicKey
    );
    console.log(balance)
})()

Output: 7912350560 which is correct, since I have 7.912350560 SOL in that account.

But for the SPL Token it didn't work yet...

Answer 3

To get the list of foreign accounts with their balances, the following CLI command can be used:

$ spl-token accounts --owner <account owner's pubkey>

• where <account owner's pubkey> is the public key or address of the wallet you want to get the info about.