How to create your own ERC20 token on Ethereum without any coding

Here at coinstructor.io we allow you to create a ERC20 token — your very own cryptocurrency on Ethereum, without any programming or coding skills required.

So you want to create your own cryptocoin for a superb new project idea that you have. But don’t know where to start. If that is the case — you’ve come to a right place! But before diving into details — let’s take a step back and take a broad look at ERC20, Ethereum, and cryptocurrencies in general.

A brief history of ERC20, Ethereum and Blockchains

In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto — an anonymous genius or group of geniuses — published a paper describing a new electronic cash system that would allow internet payments to take place without going through financial institutions and their transaction fees.

It all started with a white paper.

This is how the blockchain was born. It took some time for technological community to examine the possibilities of this new invention and soon after that, other blockchain networks began to appear, proposing different solutions for many different problems. Especially the Ethereum network gained popularity among developers quickly later in 2014 because it can be considered as its own operating system running on blockchain, allowing anyone to create decentralized applications (DApps) or deploy their own tokens.

Applying the core principles of bitcoin’s success, the creator of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin proposed another solution to issues in many fields — building decentralized applications that do not require third party trust and can be run by anyone on the global scale of Ethereum platform using smart contracts technology.

Smart contract is a program that runs on the blockchain and it’s completely transparent and verifiable for anyone.

A smart contract can be compared to a vending machine, where anyone can put something into the machine, but only the owner of the money can use it afterward.

A few concerns began to appear right after Ethereum was launched — how do people create their own tokens? How do they control them? What if there is a bug and someone else takes over control over tokens created by one person or a group of people? How to make sure that smart contracts are secure and won’t allow any unexpected behavior from within (such as altering token balances)?

In order to resolve these issues, ERC20 token standard was made. It defines a common list of rules that every ERC20-compatible token has to follow in order to function correctly on the platform. These rules are not set by the Ethereum Foundation, but the community itself. This is how ERC20 token standard became one of the most important standards in cryptocurrency. It defines what things that every token has to have, how developers should interact with it on the platform and what specific values can be taken from them during transactions.

Back in 2017, tokens were mostly used for crowdfunding in ICO’s (initial coin offering) — something like IPO’s and company shares, but they can also be used as currencies or assets inside decentralized applications, for governance, as collateral, etc. New projects keep coming up all the time with new ideas, but none of them would work without ERC20 token system and its superb integration into Ethereum platform.

Over 350,000 different ERC20 tokens exist on Ethereum network (during the time of writing — January 2021).

So how do I create an ERC20 token?

Many people will tell you that understanding and engineering smart contracts are not easy — and that is true, especially from a security viewpoint. Even if you have a code already (e.g. from a popular and audited library like OpenZeppelin) — deploying the code to Ethereum network requires at least a basic knowledge in programming — and without that, your token will just remain a piece of code in a file on your computer…

We’ve made a smart contracts tool to make it easy for anyone to deploy his own ERC20 token to Ethereum network — ready to use with any blockchain-based applications. Anyone can now use this standard and create their own tokens on Ethereum platform without any coding skills required.

Meet: coinstructor.io

The interface allows you to enter all crucial pieces of information regarding a new token:

• name
• symbol
• total supply
• (number of decimals is fixed at 18 as a current state-of-art community standard)

The interface is very simple and has all features needed in order to create tokens without any coding knowledge required from you.

After entering details about a new token, click Deploy Token button and then go through another step of approving the transaction in Metamask. You will need some ETH on your Metamask wallet to pay the network fees to the miners (called gas), so they have an incentive to mine your transaction into the blockchain, and a 0.05 ETH fee for the service.

Coinstructor.io is 6–7x cheaper in gas than any traditional token-creation service

This is still cheaper than any other such service currently available on Ethereum — even free ones! Why so? Because all of them aren’t optimized for low gas-usage — and with current crazy gas prices the transaction on any of these services can start from $300–500 and go up to $2500! Yes, just for creating a token. Coinstructor.io uses gas-optimized MinimalProxy pattern (EIP1167) which reduces gas costs dramatically — up to 6–7 times cheaper than the cheapest service you can find. So you pay just $50 gas, and $50 fee — and that’s it — your token is live!

So, after confirming a transaction with MetaMask and paying all necessary fees — your fresh new baked smart contract is created successfully and available on the blockchain! Hurray! You will be presented with all your token details — it’s address on Etherscan, and a button to add it to MetaMask, so you can use it.

All you have to do now is sending your token to clients, investors, or even family and friends — in the end, it’s a fully functional currency — you can even put it to UniSwap and set a price for it (and btw, we are currently working on a button to allow you to do that in 1-click).

Our smart contract code is 100% compatible with ERC20 standard, and is based on a stripped-out version of a popular audited OpenZeppelin library. The only difference is that instead of deploying the full code all over and over again — we have it deployed once, and then just deploy a MinimalProxy which has it’s own storage and points to that singleton implementation. More on that — in a separate article, describing all the technical details.

So, to sum up — everything can be done without the knowledge of coding or experience with blockchain technology. In fact, you do not need to know anything about blockchain to create tokens! That’s how simple it is.

Try it yourself — visit coinstructor.io