You will find many guides on how to prepare an Initial Coin Offering scattered all over the internet. However, most of the time, the primary focus in ICOs go to marketing, PR and fundraising aspects, leaving IT details to the tech people.
We are those tech people. The 4soft team is in the process of establishing strong foundations for fintech cryptocurrency projects, and we would love to share our experience.
This is the first article from a series created to share our expertise on ICO software development with CTOs and CEOs that need data-driven insights.
Okay, let’s cut to the chase.
What ICO means for you as a tech expert?
If you are the person responsible for the technical aspect of the Initial Coin Offering in your company, we have both good and bad news for you.
The good news is: many parts of the process do not need a particular expertise, and you can take care of them by yourself.
The bad news is: the process is very fragile, and we have seen some tech gurus trying to rise up to the challenge and fail simply because of the complexity.
And what goes in blockchain, stays in blockchain. It can be either your brilliant state of the art solution or a statue of failure written in the irreversible crypto font.
That’s just the beginning. The next challenge during your ICO will be ensuring legal compliance, such as preparing for the Know Your Customer regulations. Of course, there are multiple ways to answer to that, but you simply need to know that not every creative crypto idea you may already have at this point can get past the legislative traps.
So, before you get to coding, lawyer up and make sure you’re safe and well-advised on the legal part of your project. Then proceed with care and attention to the technical details.
4soft ICO process
We know that there are many ways to achieve your ICO plan, but I highly doubt that you came all the way here to listen to ALL the potential possibilities.
Let’s talk about an approach that really works and could work for your company. At 4soft, we’ve developed our own elastic process to support small and medium-sized businesses in ICO projects.
For now, let’s focus on the shortest, easiest and the most accessible proven way to create your own coin.
Based on our experience, it starts with a custom Smart Contract sewed into the Ethereum blockchain – the core of your new cryptocurrency.
1. Creating a Smart Contract: How to create a Smart Contract on Ethereum?
A preferable language to start your project will be Solidity, as the primary and the most popular language used on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The language itself is rather easy, and creating a basic Smart Contract in the most popular ERC-20 standard takes roughly two man-days of a capable developer.
>> ICOWatchlist
What is ERC-20? It is the widely accepted technical standard for Ethereum. Most of the tokens released through Ethereum ICOs are compliant with the ERC-20 standard.
It contains six basic functions:
- totalSupply
- balanceOf
- allowance
- transfer
- approve
- transferFrom
Not getting into too much detail here, it’s all you need for your new cryptocurrency.
If you decide to create the Smart Contract yourself, you need to triple check and heavily test it before deployment. There’s a number of companies tha
