All right. 1
So I'm pretty excited about this one. 2
We're going to be learning how to create your own tokens on the Internet computer. 3
And this is really, really cool because you've probably heard a lot about these tokens like Shiba Inu 4
or Doge or Bitcoin, Ethereum. 5
But finally, we're going to be creating our own custom tokens. 6
So that could be Angela coin, or if you're an Amy, it could be Amy Coin. 7
And it's really awesome because we're going to get to create these crypto tokens of our own and see 8
how the process of building that on the blockchain actually works. 9
The first question a lot of people ask is What's the difference between a token and a coin? 10
Because you hear this a lot. 11
There's the Shiba Inu token or the Doge coin. 12
What's the actual difference? 13
Well, the definition is that if you want to have a coin, you actually need your own blockchain. 14
So you have to build a blockchain from scratch. 15
And we'll talk a little bit about the pros and cons of that. 16
Whereas tokens, you can actually taken advantage of an existing blockchain such as Ethereum or the 17
Internet computer blockchain. 18
Now, what's the difference between these two? 19
Well, one common coin that you might have heard off, a meme coin, is Doge. 20
And there's a meme token which was created supposedly as the Doge killer 21
is the Shiba token. 22
Now the dogecoin has its own blockchain and it's basically a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. 23
So somebody created a fork, 24
so a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain which was called Lucky Coin, and then the people behind Doge 25
as a joke actually created a fork of the lucky coin, which is why we have doge these days. 26
There's a huge amount of trading in these coins, which is kind of insane, especially given that initially 27
they were created sort of as a joke. 28
The current market cap of circulating dogecoins is something around $17 billion, which is absolutely 29
insane. 30
So then you've got the Shiba coin, which a lot of people refer to as a coin, but actually it's a token. 31
And the reason why it's a token is because it was built on the Ethereum blockchain. 32
So the Shiba token doesn't have its own blockchain, and it was much, much easier to create. 33
And the people who created it were very, very smart at marketing it and leveraged the growing number 34
of users that use Ethereum. 35
And as you can see, even though it was created more recently, its market cap is just behind Doge, 36
something around $14 billion. 37
And so here are some of the differences between creating a coin versus creating a token. In order to 38
create a coin, 39
firstly, you need to create a blockchain, which is not that hard. 40
You could just simply make a copy of an existing blockchain. 41
But in order for your blockchain to be secure, you'll need to recruit a large number of miners who 42
are willing to mine your coin. 43
So in the case of Bitcoin and Doge, that means using up a lot of energy and resources. 44
But also you have to find people who think that your coin has a future to be willing to spend those 45
energy and that electricity to actually mine your coin. 46
Now, on the other hand, with tokens, you don't have to do any of that. 47
And as we'll see later on, as we create our own token, all we have to do is just to write the code 48
for the ledger and to specify how our token is going to be transferred and how it's going to be recorded 49
on our ledger. 50
And if you're interested in creating a token because you want to reach similar market caps as Doge or 51
Shiba, then a really interesting story that I came across was how the Shiba token actually rose to 52
its current prominence and how it gained a massive amount of following and market cap almost overnight 53
basically. 54
So when they first created this coin, they were able to take advantage of the huge number of Ethereum 55
users because the Shiba token is created on the Ethereum network. 56
So that means instead of having to create your own decentralized exchange, you could actually just 57
use existing Ethereum exchanges like Uniswap. 58
And this meant that there was a massive amount of trading activity from the very beginning, unlike 59
the case of Doge, where you actually have to build up the following over a long period of time. 60
And also, you need some sort of exchange so that people can get hold of your coins. 61
Now, in addition, what the Shiba token creators did is they sent half of the total circulating volume 62
of Shiba tokens, which was they created a massive amount, something like a quadrillion tokens, 63
and they sent half of that to Vitalik Buterin, who's the founder of Ethereum. 64
Now, because the Shiba token was created on the Ethereum network, then you can 65
do this as long as you know somebody's public 66
wallet address. 67
And they were very clever because they sent it to one of his cold wallets. 68
So it's a wallet that isn't online, that isn't necessarily what you would use day to day. 69
Instead, it's a wallet which required basically two pieces of paper that he had, one on him and another 70
all the way in Canada with his family. 71
And during COVID, it was really difficult to actually get hold of these two pieces of information in 72
order to actually be able to access these tokens. 73
Because what he wants to do immediately is to get rid of them, because he doesn't want to be seen as 74
supporting any of these tokens or any of these new meme coins and fluctuate its value and potentially 75
be involved in shady dealings or be accused of stuff like that. 76
So it took him a lot of effort to basically burn a lot of these tokens that he got sent. 77
And burning it just means destroying it or sending it to a wallet that can't be accessed. 78
And what he had left was something around $1 billion worth of Shiba tokens, which he then donated to 79
the Indian COVID relief fund. 80
And he basically said, in the future, please don't send me these coins. 81
I really don't want to be involved. 82
But in this case, it's really interesting just because of the sheer amount of money that he was essentially 83
given. 84
And this sort of story also legitimized Shiba token in some way because they could say, look, you 85
know, the founder of Ethereum owns Shiba tokens, so you should, too, and continue their very successful 86
marketing campaign. 87
But history aside, what are tokens used for? 88
We've already seen that they're used for payment, 89
so you can exchange one token for another token or you can exchange one token for some sort of service 90
or product. 91
But you can also use tokens in very novel ways. 92
You can have them as equity. 93
So you could give people a certain amount of tokens so that they can vote on the future of your decentralized 94
application. 95
For example, in ICP, you can buy ICP tokens and you can stake them on the Internet computer to vote 96
for certain agendas. 97
And in turn you'll be rewarded for doing that 98
and also your tokens will go up in value. 99
And it's sort of similar to how you might own shares in a company in a traditional sense. 100
Now I know I just said ICP token instead of ICP coin, even though the internet computer technically 101
has its own blockchain. 102
But to be honest, the word token is what you hear being used most often these days, regardless of 103
the distinction. 104
And finally, you've got another category of tokens which are sort of for utility purposes. 105
For example, if we think about the cycles that we got from the faucet when we deployed our decentralized 106
application, those cycles are a form of token and they used to be able to interact with a particular 107
application or for some sort of functionality within the application or blockchain. 108
So in our case is to be able to pay for computing cycles. 109
But you've got other tokens as well. 110
For example, the We Power, the WPR token, which is actually something that represents a real-world item. 111
It represents energy. 112
And this is a blockchain that allows small providers and small companies to directly exchange energy 113
for these tokens on this blockchain. 114
Or you've got axie infinity where you can earn AXS tokens when you play various games within the 115
Axie Infinity Universe, and you can use those for payment, for staking or for voting and governance 116
as well. 117
So with all of that said, I hope you are as excited as I am to start creating our very own tokens. 118
And in this tutorial I'm going to be creating my own custom token, which I'm going to call the DAngela 119
token or DANG for short for our currency. 120
So let's get started creating of very own awesome tokens on the ICP.