Creating the token is the easy part. It takes a few seconds and costs a fraction of a SOL. Everything that determines whether the coin goes anywhere happens before and after that moment, and most launches fail on those parts rather than on the mint itself.
This walks through the decisions in the order you have to make them.
Pick a name and ticker you can defend
The ticker is what people type and what shows up in every chart, so it carries more weight than the full name. Short is better — three to five characters reads cleanly everywhere. Check that the ticker isn't already strongly associated with a larger token, because search results and price charts will not distinguish between you and them, and you will spend your first week correcting people.
Avoid anything that reads as an impersonation of an existing project. It draws takedown attention, exchanges deprioritise it, and it caps how seriously the coin can ever be taken.
Get the artwork right the first time
The image is the token's entire visual identity, and once it is written into on-chain metadata it is awkward to change. Use a square image, at least 500x500, that stays legible at 32 pixels — that is the size it appears at in most wallets and on most charts. Fine detail, thin text and subtle gradients all disappear at that scale.
Transparent backgrounds tend to look broken against dark interfaces. A solid or simple background is safer.
Decide the supply
Supply is mostly cosmetic. A token with a billion units at $0.00001 and one with a million units at $0.01 are worth exactly the same. What supply actually changes is how the price reads to people, and there is a convention on Solana: one billion units with six or nine decimal places. Deviating from it invites questions you gain nothing from answering.
Understand the three authorities
A newly created SPL token has three permissions attached to it, and what you do with them is the single most scrutinised thing about your launch.
- Mint authority lets the holder create more tokens at will. Leaving it enabled means you can inflate the supply indefinitely — buyers will read this as the ability to rug them, and they are not wrong.
- Freeze authority lets the holder freeze any individual token account, preventing that person from selling. Very few legitimate projects need this.
- Update authority lets the holder change the token's name, symbol and image after launch. Occasionally useful, frequently abused to swap a token's identity after people have bought in.
Add liquidity
A token nobody can trade has no price. Liquidity means pairing your token with SOL in a pool so that anyone can buy or sell against it. The ratio you deposit sets the opening price, and the total amount determines how much a single trade moves that price — a thin pool means the first meaningful buy sends the price vertical and the first meaningful sell erases it.
The pool tokens you receive represent your claim on that liquidity. Projects that intend to stay around either lock or burn them, because holding them means retaining the ability to withdraw the entire pool.
The part that actually decides it
Everything above is mechanical and takes about ten minutes. What separates a coin that trades from one that doesn't is whether anyone has a reason to care about it before it launches — a community, a joke that has already spread, a moment it attaches to.
Launching first and looking for attention afterwards is the most common way this goes wrong.