Every SPL token on Solana is the same handful of accounts and instructions underneath. Knowing what they are makes it much easier to tell a safe launch from an unsafe one, whether or not you ever write the code yourself.
1. The mint account
A token starts as a mint account: a small on-chain record holding the decimal precision, the current supply, and the two authorities. The account has to be created and rent-funded before it can be initialised, which is why the first two instructions in any token creation transaction are a system-program account creation followed by the token program initialising it.
Decimals are fixed at this moment and can never change. Six is the Solana convention for memecoins; nine matches SOL itself.
2. The associated token account
Balances don't live on the mint. Each holder has a separate account that holds their balance of that specific token, derived deterministically from their wallet address and the mint — the associated token account. It has to exist before that wallet can receive any of the token, so creating your own is the third instruction.
3. Minting the supply
With the mint initialised and a destination account ready, the mint-to instruction creates the entire supply in one go and deposits it into your account. Amounts here are in base units, so a supply of one billion at six decimals is 1,000,000,000,000,000 — getting this conversion wrong by a factor of a million is a common and unfixable mistake.
4. Metaplex metadata
The token program itself has no concept of a name, a symbol or an image. Those live in a separate account owned by the Metaplex Token Metadata program, at an address derived from the mint. That account holds the name, the symbol, and a URI pointing at a JSON file — conventionally on IPFS — which in turn holds the description, image URL and social links.
This is why a token can show up in a wallet as an unnamed address: the mint exists, but nothing ever created its metadata account.
5. Revoking authorities
Revoking is a set-authority instruction that sets the relevant authority to null. There is no undo. Mint and freeze authority live on the mint account; update authority lives on the metadata account and is revoked by marking that account immutable.
Doing all of this in a single transaction matters more than it sounds. It means the wallet shows you every instruction before you approve, including any fee, and either all of it lands or none of it does — you can never end up with a half-created token.
What it costs
Rent for the mint account and the metadata account, plus transaction fees. On mainnet this is a fraction of a SOL in total, most of it recoverable rent rather than spend. On devnet it costs nothing real, which is why it is worth doing the whole flow there once before doing it for real.