Web3 Starter

01

Prerequisites

Everything below is free and takes about five minutes. Nothing is installed on your machine.

Wallet

MetaMask

Browser extension. This is the account that deploys the contract and receives the whole token supply.

Install the extension

Gas

Testnet ETH

Free from a Sepolia faucet. Deploying costs gas even on a testnet, so grab a little before we start.

Open the faucet

Editor

Remix IDE

Runs entirely in the browser. Compiler and deployer built in, zero setup.

Launch Remix

Ready when you have

MetaMask installed and unlocked
Network switched to Sepolia
Some test ETH in the account
remix.ethereum.org open in a tab

02

The code

Eleven lines, and that's the entire token. Here's what each one does — short version. I'll open each of these up as we go.

Token.sol

The big idea

A token isn't an object in your wallet. It's a number stored in a contract, filed under your address.

Why it's short

OpenZeppelin already wrote the hard part. We inherit it and make one decision: who gets the supply.

The line that matters

Line 9. It's the only line making an economic choice — everything else is setup.

03

How to do it

Follow along in Remix. Six steps from empty tab to deployed contract.

1

Open Remix and make the file

Go to remix.ethereum.org. In the File Explorer, create a new file under contracts/.

contracts/Token.sol

2

Paste the eleven lines

Exactly as they appear in the previous module. Remix reads the @openzeppelin import and pulls the package down for you — no npm install needed in the browser.

3

Compile

Solidity Compiler tab. Set the version to 0.8.20 or higher, then hit Compile. A green check means you have bytecode and an ABI.

Compiler: 0.8.20+commit → Compile Token.sol

4

Connect your wallet

Deploy & Run tab. Change Environment to Injected Provider — MetaMask. Approve the connection and confirm you're on Sepolia.

5

Fill the three constructor arguments

Pick MyToken in the contract dropdown, expand the Deploy field, and enter your name, ticker, and supply. Supply is in whole tokens — the contract handles the rest.

name: Workshop Token symbol: WORK initialSupply: 1000000

6

Deploy and confirm

Hit Deploy, then confirm the transaction in MetaMask. A few seconds later the contract appears under Deployed Contracts with its own address.

04

Results

What you should be looking at once the transaction confirms.

In Remix

A contract address

Under Deployed Contracts. This is your token's permanent home on Sepolia — copy it, you'll need it twice more.

0x5FbDB2315678afecb367f032d93F642f64180aa3

In Remix

Buttons that answer

Expand the contract and call the read functions. Nothing here was written by you — it all came from the inherited ERC20.

name() · symbol() · decimals() · totalSupply()

In MetaMask

Your full supply

Import the token by pasting the contract address. MetaMask fills in the ticker and decimals itself, then shows you the balance.

1,000,000 WORK

On Etherscan

A transfer from nowhere

Look up the address on sepolia.etherscan.io. The first event in the token's history is the mint — a transfer out of the zero address.

From 0x0000…0000 → you

Module 05

GGs

You just deployed a real token to a real blockchain.

◆ A fixed-supply ERC-20, live at its own address

◆ Nine standard functions, none of which you wrote

◆ Recognised by MetaMask and Etherscan automatically

◆ No owner, no admin keys, nobody can mint more

Where this goes next

Every feature people associate with tokens — mintable supply, burning, an owner, pausing, caps — is one more name in the is clause on line 6. The file grows exactly where you'd expect, because the structure you just read is the structure it keeps.