Creating Five & Done Tokens with Ethereum
In an effort to get familiar with Cryptocurrencies and Block chain technologies, I figured it would be a great first approach to create a token for Five & Done. I’ve already expressed my thoughts on the importance of understanding this technology in our industry in a previous post, I’m writing this to help point out any hurdles.
Why Currency?
Creating a token seems to be the “Hello World” example for anyone looking to get their feet wet with blockchain technologies, and what better place to start then going over to https://ethereum.org and going through their tutorial on creating a token.
I also though it would be fun experimenting with other means of motivation within our agency. What if we attach some real monetary value to these tokens. What if I as a developer, want some design help? Could I barter coins for time? Could we exchange tokens for other company perks?
Why Ethereum?
Ethereum is doing right by bridging the gap between developers and its technology by making it easy to get started.
If you visit https://ethereum.org/ — at the time of this writing — you only need to scroll down below the fold to see the first mention of Solidity, Ethereum’s scripting language “whose syntax is similar to that of JavaScript”.
The Code!
The code I used was taken almost entirely from this tutorial. I’ve modified it slightly because I want to record a reason of the transfer. At the time of this writing, I’m gearing this coin for bartering among co-workers, so I’ve added a string _for in the transfer method.
Dispersing funds!
To generate buzz among coworkers, I sent a general message in Slack stating that the first people to create a wallet would receive 20% of the coin. Seeing as I only created 5 token, that would be 1 token each. Now, I also needed a fancy logo for this coin, and so I bribed a designer to design one for me for 1 $FD as well. I’m left with 2 $FD right now so I’m still majority shareholder.
What I’ve learned so far
As simple as this exercise was, I’ve learned the basics of working with Smart Contracts. Also, as I’ve dipped my feet into this technology, I’m understanding more and more about possible use cases for other real world business needs.
What’s next
My next steps include following the tutorials for creating a Crowdsale application and explore creating a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Once I feel better about my potential, I want to see what my options are for creating Web Application that are backed by the blockchain. I want to be able to query data related to contracts I’m making and, of-course, explore how Ethereum and Docker play together.
