Launch a Meme Coin in 3 minutes
Learn about Meme coins and launch your own!
TLDR:
Meme coins are coins based on memes, they seem silly but some command very high market caps. A few dog-themed coins have been the most successful.
Creating a token on the EVM is trivial, you can use a pre-baked solution like CoinTool, or copy and paste code into Remix and deploy the contract directly.
Creating a liqudity pool on a DEX is crucial for that coin to be picked up and people to start trading. Make sure to do an initial swap and verify the contract too.
Meme coins live and die by their marketing and visibility. Apps like DEXTools will show new coin pairs and can be updated with a Discord/Telegram group link.
This year has been very good for crypto markets. We came out of the bear market slowly to start but ended up full steam ahead with coins and tokens flying up in the past couple of months.
One of the key categories that has continued to impress is the “meme coin” category, $Bonk alone has done over 100x in the past 2 months, and helped sell Solana’s otherwise failed Saga phones because of the promise of a $Bonk airdrop included.
So let’s end this year by getting playful and make our own meme coin!
Meme Coins
Meme coins are pretty much what they say on the tin, they are coins based around memes, often very silly memes! This makes them easy to overlook and not take too seriously, however a quick look at how high a market cap some of these coins command can make you change your opinion pretty fast.
The most successful meme coins have easily been the dog-themed ones. Why exactly this is the case is hard to tell but it probably has to do with how one of the first and most successful meme coins was Dogecoin launched back in 2013.
Doge was intended as just a silly coin based on a famous Internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog called Doge, but it ended up taking a proportion beyond even the original founders’ expectations, and today it commands one of the highest market caps, being in the top 10 of all crypto coins.
Each major chain has ended up having their own incredibly successful dog-meme equivalent, with $Shib on Ethereum, and $Bonk on Solana. In fact these are the 3 largest meme coins by market cap according to Coinmarketcap.com.
However, it’s not just dog themed memes, there are memes about almost anything you can imagine, for example another highly successful one has been $Pepe based on the Internet meme called Pepe the Frog. But in the past there have been all sorts of other memes that have taken off like “Safe Moon” and many with NSFW names!
If you check DEXTools you’ll find there’s a new meme coin launching almost every minute in crypto, however 99% of them don’t make it anywhere, and a large number of them are intentional “rugs” ie. the creators created them just to steal all the liquidity as soon as it goes up in price.
People buy meme coins purely on speculation that price will go up, it’s essentially a form of Web3 gambling. Yet it can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because as soon as it does reach a certain size and market cap, there’s enough capital and people networked around it to give it some genuine utilty and make it a genuine investment.
Meme coins have become part of Web3 culture, whether you like it or not. This is probably because Web3 has a lot of gamblers and meme coins are a great avenue for them to get their dopamine hits, as they ride the price up and down.
Now let’s run through how to launch your own meme coin so that you can create one yourself!
Launch your own Token
It’s ridiculously simple to create a token on Ethereum or any other EVM chain, all you really need to is spin up a ready-made contract and put it on-chain.
To do this there are many pre-baked solutions to help you out such as CoinTool.
Open the site on the create token tab, then select the network you want to create the meme coin on, in this case I chose Polygon. In keeping with the dog theme I called my token “Bull Doge” with the symbol “$BULL”, and set the initial supply to 100 million.
CoinTool gives you a lot of additional settings. For example you can set things like taxes on buying or selling, blacklists and more. In the example below I set a sell tax of 1% and a holders reward of 1%.
With your settings finalised, all you need to do is select the “Create Token” button right at the bottom, sign the transaction, and you’re done!
With a few steps we’ve created our own EVM-based meme coin!
Simple right?
Cheaper Token Launch
Using CoinTool as above is super simple and easy to use, but they will charge you 200 MATIC (around $140 on today’s price) on Polygon and even more on other networks. So I’m also going to show a much cheaper alternative!
First open up the Remix IDE, which I’ve already explained how to use before in my tutorial called writing your first smart contract.
Then copy the code that I’ve uploaded to this pastebin here into a new file in Remix.
Scroll right down to the bottom of the code and chage the name and symbol from “Bull Doge” and “BULL” to your own name. Select “Deploy & Run Transactions” and change the environment to “Injected Provider - Metamask”, then hit Deploy!
The end result will be the same as using CoinTool, although this version of the code doesn’t have as many variables or options to tweak as they offer.
Nonetheless, I did this and paid only $0.25 in MATIC, rather than the $140 (200 MATIC) that CoinTool was charging!
Create Liquidity Pool
Having created your token you still need to allow traders to pick it up and trade, and the most common and simplest way to do this is to create a Liquidity Pool on a DEX. All this means is creating a trading pair between your new token and another one that’s already got value in the market.
For this we’ll go with Uniswap, one of the most used DEXs on Polygon.
Open Uniswap then select pools and choose “+ New Position”. You’ll need to select both tokens. First copy in the address of the contract you’ve just minted your new tokens from. It will give you a warning because it’s an unkown token, but just carry on.
Next you add the pair along with it, in this case I went with MATIC but if you’re on Ethereum it’s common to use ETH or a stablecoin. Set the price range to be the “full range” and set the % you want to get as people trade it, I set this to 0.3%.
Now you’ll be asked to set the starting price, and the amount of the paired asset you want to put against your new token. For this example I put 50m BULL = 5 MATIC ($5.18), essentially setting the full market cap of all 100m BULL = $10! You can play around with these numbers as you want though.
Finally, you’ll be asked to approve the required transactions and once they have gone through you’re done!
If you look back at the “pools” section in Uniswap you’ll now find you have an active position reflecting this new trading pair you created.
DEX Tools
Having created the token and creating a trading pair, your new meme coin will now appear on DEXTools! You can see in the image below that BULL is a new pair that just appeared over 1m ago.
DEXTools is where most Web3 degen traders come to see new meme coins being released, so it’s important to be found on here. If we click on BULL we see there’s still no price showing and the contract hasn’t been verified, so it’s unlikely anyone will pay attention to it.
To fix this you’ll want to go back to Uniswap and make a swap in that pool, and uou can sell MATIC for BULL or vice-versa. Just by buying or selling the token you’ll have set an initial market price for the token and that’ll show up on DEXTools.
It’s recommended to also “Verify and Publish” the smart contract on the blockchain explorer, in this case polygonscan, so people know it’s not an outright scam.
You can do this through CoinTool, but if you deployed the code through Remix you’ll need to create an account on Polygonscan and select the verify option there. Set the compiler version to the one that appears in Remix, use the MIT License, and then copy and paste all the code from Remix into the box and you’ll get a success message!
Now if you go back to DEXTools you’ll find that your meme coin has a price, market cap and validated contract, so it’s considered safe to interact with!
Going Beyond
You’ve now created your own meme coin and reached the end of the technical part of the process, but this is just the beginning! Meme coins live and breathe through marketing, now the token exists on-chain you still need to get people to know about it.
DEXTools has a form where you can pay to set variables like a logo for your coin, and direct people to a Telegram or Discord group.
Often community managers are hired to look after these Telegram groups and influencers are brought onboard to grow visibility. However, marketing is beyond the scope of this post, the goal was to focus just on the technical part.
Now you know how to create your own meme coin, so why not get out there and give it a go, who knows you might just make the next $Shib!
And that’s all for 2023, have a happy new year all!