Over the past few years since the launch of the Ethereum network and other blockchains that can create tokens, initial coin offerings (ICOs) have been all the rage as all of these token projects have raised billions of dollars in ether, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. A great majority of the ICOs today are 'ERC-20 tokens' created by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with no more than a few hundred lines of code. Unfortunately, there's a big misconception that a bunch of nerdy geniuses created these blockchain-based tokens, and today we're going to show you just how easy it is to create an ERC-20 token — In less than thirty minutes.

Posternut (PNT): The ERC-20 Token Created in Less Than 30 Minutes

Today we decided to create a contract using the programming language Solidity, in order to create a custom token using the Ethereum network. We want to demonstrate just how easy it is for anyone with very little coding knowledge to launch a coin. There are lots of ICOs out there in the crypto-space and a great majority of them are ERC-20s derived from the public Ethereum blockchain. Essentially an ERC-20 token is a contract written in Solidity that sets the parameters of the coins attributes, like where the tokens are stored, the token's name, ticker symbol, supply, and more.

We used this code here found in the walkthrough written by Moritz Neto and the code was developed by an Ethereum developer called 'BokkyPooBah.'

The Necessary Requirements

Finding out how to create a token only takes a minute with a quick Google search on the subject. We followed a short walkthrough written by Moritz Neto, and watched a quick video filmed by the Youtuber Ivan on Tech. Both instructions detailed the creation of an ERC-20 token that can be done in less than 20 minutes, and we created a token called 'Posternut (PTN) in 25 minutes. In light of our first time creating a Solidity contract, we used ETH testnet tokens on the Ropsten Network so no real funds were lost.