Issuing a Solana token

Following on from this @bfriel_ tweet, I decided to issue a token on Solana just to figure out how its done.

After not much thought, settled on 8PI as the token name, did a SVG of my pfp for the logo, and got on with it.

Brian's instructions are excellent and worth following along.  I did not have patience to generate the a vanity address, so I just used the randomly generated addresses.

Creating the token on mainnet is easy. Actually hooking it up so people can find it.. a little more complicated.

1) Firstly, every wallet needs an Associated Token Account for a specific token before it can receive that token. So you have to spend some dust to airdrop tokens to people

2) Secondly if you just airdrop with dust, then they see Unknown Token in their wallet

3) In order for the wallet to id the token, you have to list the token in the solana registry. Currently this is on github, using an automated merge process to merge new tokens into registry

Following Brian's instructions, I managed to get my token onto registry. However it took a couple of days before it showed up on phantom.

This is what the logo for the 8PI token was supposed to be

This is what showed up on phantom

So note to self, the transparent color doesn't work well because phantom is using a grey background. Oh well, will have to deal with that later.

So I started the update logo process... let's see how long that takes..

In the meantime, I mentioned this to a couple of friends and immediately got requests for me to transfer tokens from them. And one of them immediately mentioned it to his friend, and that guy is looking around on where to buy it. This is nuts.

I'm going to try and follow up on Brian's post, next on my todo list:

• Listing on Serum
• Listing on Coingecko
• Lending
• AMM-Like Swaps