It is trivial to create assets on Stellar. It was built to keep track of any arbitrary asset, or currency so can also be easily used for all these new tokens that are popping up. Here I'll walk you through how you do this technically by creating an example token... Let's say I want to make a HUG token. Anyone can send me one of these HUG tokens and I'll hug them. I want to create 5000 of these and want to ensure the world that no more are ever created so no one has to be concerned with hug inflation. There are wallets that provide an easier interface for many of these steps but I'll just use the Stellar laboratory.
Step 1 - Create issuing account
You can use the laboratory to generate the key pair. You must now send lumens to this public key to create the account inside the network. From any Stellar wallet Send 31 lumens to the new public key you just generated. Issuing account:
Public Key: GD5T6IPRNCKFOHQWT264YPKOZAWUMMZOLZBJ6BNQMUGPWGRLBK3U7ZNP
Secret Key: SDQXUYNUW36UG3BPJSJIV3OPGJGKWKCQ3IOSFIVG3KBV4SSRWWELIYTQ
You can also do this step programatically.
Step 2 - Create distribution account.
Use the same method as above to create the account but create it with at least 41 lumens. HUG distribution:
Public Key: GCQUV7WA4SP3LNTRDOBSURENX6WA5JU7Q5B54Y5I2G4IRTGG2IZ6M72M
Step 3 - Trust the issuing account.
Here is the change trust operation that we need to use in the laboratory. In your case, change the parameters to the accounts you created in steps 1 and 2 and the token you want to create. Also remember to click the button to fetch the correct sequence number for your distribution account.
Step 4 - Create tokens
Now that the distribution account trusts the issuing account the HUG tokens can be created. This is done by simply sending a payment from the issuing account to the distribution account as done here. See the Stellar docs for more details about issuing assets.
Step 5 - Publish information about your token
Ideally there will be a more formalized protocol around this so that clients can programmatically display details about each token. Here I've created a simple doc describing the HUG token, the conditions it can be redeemed under, etc.
{ "code": "HUG", "name": "hug token", "desc": "1 HUG token entitles you to a hug from Jed McCaleb.", "conditions": "You must travel to Jed to receive your hug. You must be in a reasonably clean condition before receiving your hug."}In order to prove that I'm the one that created this token, I'm also signing the doc with my keybase public key. I take this doc and publish it to IPFS. You can see the full document here here. Now we want to attach the IPFS hash of the token description to the issuing account. We do this with the manage data operation. Here is this transaction in the laboratory.
Step 6 - Limit the supply
Great! Your token exists and you have told people what it is all about. Now you likely want to prove to the world that you won't flood the market with your tokens. The simplest way to do this is to lock the issuing account so that it can no longer make transactions. You can do this with the multi-sig features of Stellar. You simply change the weight of the master signer on the account. Now that the account is locked you can be sure that there will only ever be 5000 HUGs in the world. You can see that the issuing account is locked here and I posted the secret key above so feel free to try it to make sure it can't issue more tokens.
Step 7 - Distribute your Token
Ok now your token exists and everything is setup. The final step is to get them in the hands of the people. There are many ways to do this of course. One of the great features of Stellar is that it has a built in decentralized exchange. So a natural way to get the HUGs out into the world is simply to put an offer out for them. Here in the laboratory I create an offer selling HUG tokens You can see the live active HUG market here. As you can see hugs are cheap, only 30 XLM. Feel free to buy one and I look forward to you redeeming it! This was a simple example of what is possible. There are a lot of ways you can extend this basic idea to for more complicated use cases. A few ideas are:
- Inflating token supply in a predefined schedule using pre-authorized transactions
- Limit who can hold your token
- Issue a dividend
- Conducting an auction for your tokens
