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Finding Storage Slots

Axiom allows developers to provably access historic contract storage in Ethereum. As discussed in Ethereum on-chain data, contract storage is a mapping between uint256 slots and uint256 values. Compilers for higher-level languages like Solidity and Vyper map storage variables to keys in this mapping, known as storage slots.

To access contract storage, developers can use Axiom-provided Storage Subqueries and Solidity Nested Mapping Subqueries. This requires specifying:

  • The raw storage slot for the Storage Subquery.
  • The storage slot the Solidity mapping lies in for the Solidity Nested Mapping Subquery.

Therefore, using Axiom to access historic Ethereum contract storage trustlessly requires finding the relevant storage slot for your storage variable. We provide two methods for developers to do this.

Option 1: evm.storage​

You can use evm.storage to show the storage layout of any deployed contract on mainnet. If we paste in the Developer DAO NFT contract address in evm.storage, we see a layout of the storage slots starting from 0:

evm.storage only works on Ethereum mainnet. See Foundry CLI for testnets.

evm.storage

To prove the holders of this NFT at a specific block, we can access either the _owners or _balances mappings, which we see lie in slots 2 and 3, respectively. We can also access the raw storage value of _status in slot 0x0a.

Option 2 - Foundry CLI​

You can use the Foundry CLI to show the storage layout of a contract you have locally on your machine using forge inspect.

# show the storage layout of a contract
forge inspect MyContract.sol:MyContract storage --pretty

For deployed contracts verified on Etherscan, you can use cast etherscan-source to access the source code.

If you already know the storage slot of the mapping and just want to find the corresponding slot for a particular key in the mapping, you can use cast index:

# Compute the storage slot of an entry (hello) in a mapping of type mapping(string => string), located at slot 1:
# cast index [key_type] [key] [slot]
cast index string "hello" 1