For sh*tcoins and giggles, we attempted to make our own amphibian-themed memecoin called Frogsh*t (FRGSHT) this afternoon. And it was all going swimmingly.
That is, until we realised it was about to cost us US$441 in a gas transaction fee to actually deploy on the Ethereum mainnet.
We realise we could’ve got it up and running on the Ethereum “Goerli” testnet, paying with Monopoly-money test ETH tokens for gas. But where would be the fun in that?
The point is, it’s actually stupidly easy (with the assistance of an extremely smart Solidity-coding plug-in program or two) to create an ERC-20 cryptocurrency at a very basic, no-utility, no-whitepaper, no-anything-but-a-stupid-name level.
Here was our attempt, which was ready to roll (pending hefty gas fee) in a matter of minutes. In fact, if we were slightly more competent with it all, we apparently could have created it in less than 30 seconds.
And that’s according to a Twitter account called “@iamwhitelights”, which has been gaining a lot of traction today for the following post, in which he shows he was able to “speedrun” a memecoin deployment in slightly more time than it takes to lose all your money in crypto if you don’t know what you’re doing.
According to US crypto-media sites Cointelegraph and Decrypt, the account belongs to a Brooklyn-based digital artist by the name of Johnny Shankman, who was able to create and deploy (on the Goeril testnet) a coin he dubbed EASY_MONEY in just 27 seconds.
Of course, creating a website and potentially memey image for the token, plus coming up with a half-arsed or piss-taking back story and roadmap – that’ll take you a little bit longer.
To create the token, Shankman used a couple of online applications called Contracts Wizard and Remix, and we can confirm (from following his movements in his tweeted video) that it’s very easy to do.
In a subsequent comment, Shankman noted that someone went and created a token with the same name as his testnet one, but for reals – on the Ethereum mainnet. “I will not be buying it,” he added.