Make your very own cryptocurrency
Ever thought about making your own crypto? Now you can, and it's way easier than you think.
This tutorial is going to teach you how to write and deploy a smart contract on Ethereum, and that smart contract will contain all the rules of your token. By the end of it you'll be able to see your new token in your crypto wallet and transfer to other wallets!
Token vs coin
Creating your own coin may seem like an extremely complicated task - and you're right. Today we won't be creating a coin, we'll be creating a token.
What's the difference?
A coin has its own blockchain. Bitcoin operates on the Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum operates on the Ethereum blockchain, and Dogecoin operates on the Dogechain blockchain. They each have their own transaction ledger.
A token, however, is built on an existing blockchain. They do not have their own transaction ledger, and instead are simply smart contracts that are deployed to a blockchain. A token can represent literally anything - lottery tickets, a painting, an ounce of gold, XP points in a video game, you name it. Some of these examples are non-fungible tokens (or NFTs), which means that they all have different values and are not equal to one another. But that's not what we want from a currency - my dollar should be equal in value to your dollar.
That's where something called ERC-20 comes in. ERC-20 introduces a standard for fungible tokens, i.e. tokens that are equal in value. 1 of my token will be equal to 1 of yours. ERC-20 tokens are built on the Ethereum network, and act similarly to $ETH in this way. An ERC-20 token has other characteristics too, which you can check out here. In this tutorial we will be building an ERC-20 token.
Installing metamask Before continuing with any sort of web3 development, you'll need to install Metamask. It's a crypto wallet browser extension that allows you to interact with blockchain apps. Install that to your chosen browser and follow the steps to set up an Ethereum wallet. When you're done, you should see something like this:
