Creating my own Solana Token

This is a brief write-up on how I created my own Cryptocurrency Token. This is a Coin that is created on the Solana Network. The Solana network works as a replacement for the Ethereum network that has nominal gas fees and is a Proof Of Stake network in contrast to Ethereums high fee and Proof Of Work.

This is not the same as creating a cryptocurrency coin. They have their own blockchain, their own infrastructure, and a unique way of processing data and transactions. This is a token that simply piggybacks on an already existing product.

This project demonstrates a basic understanding of Linux Command Line and Blockchain tech.

The following steps are all in the command line of a Debian Linux machine. The quote boxes are the code you can copy/paste directly into the command line.

Step 1

the first line moves you to your desktop location, the second line creates a folder where we will store our wallet and the third line creates that wallet in our new location. You can now navigate to that folder to see this .json file.

cd Desktop
mkdir SolanaWallet
solana-keygen new — outfile SolanaWallet/my-keypair.json

This should create the following output

the pubkey is the public info for your wallet, give this to people, post it online and people can send you SOL. this is YOUR_ADDRESS

The Passphrase is secret, never let anyone access this.

We are going to use the Devnet version of SOL, this keeps it away from the mainnet which is where people do real transactions, with SOL that was purchased using “real money”. The Devnet is a sandbox that can’t hurt your real wallet. The money here has no real value.

solana airdrop 1 YOUR_ADDRESS — url https://api.devnet.solana.com

Replace YOUR_ADDRESS with the pubkey above.

Step 2

solana config set — url https://devnet.solana.com
solana config set — keypair SolanaWallet/my-keypair.json

This puts you where you can configure assets on the devnet. where you can make fancy commands like the next one:

spl-token create-token

This will create a string of letters and numbers that looks similar to your pubkey. This will be YOUR_TOKEN used below.

You can know copy/paste this and see that it is a nameless token if you search for it at explorer.solana.com

You can create accounts inside of your own wallet:

spl-token create-account YOUR_TOKEN

Now your wallet has an account that can accept this unique token.

Now, we can “mint” our own token:

spl-token mint YOUR_TOKEN 420

This has set the cap and existence of 420 tokens. Right now your token is fungible because you can mint more at any time.

The following lines of code converts your token into an NFT (no art associated yet.)

spl-token create-token — decimals 0
spl-token create-account YOUR_NFT_TOKEN
spl-token mint YOUR_NFT_TOKEN 1
spl-token authorize YOUR_NFT_TOKEN mint — disable

You now have your own Solana Token and NFT.

In the next chapter of this tutorial, I will guide you through how to connect this to digital art, and how the public can interact with it online by buying and selling your art, and transferring tokens to each other.