Making a Cryptocurrency

Do you know how Bitcoin or Ethereum works? We don't and we wanted to learn more about the technologies that make up these cryptocurrencies by trying to make one ourselves!

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Inspiration

Cryptocurrency has been gaining a lot of attention so far during 2021. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin have caught the attention of people even outside the investment and technology world. We found inspiration due to the open source nature of the technology and decided that it would be a good learning experience to try to develop a token; as cryptocurrency as it is becoming ever more mainstream.

What it does

Our newly made currency, PizzaCoin, is able to make fast transactions from one wallet to another. PizzaCoin can be converted into any other ERC-20 token that is also on the Cheap Ethereum network on various sites such as CheapSwap.io. One of the many uses of PizzaCoin is that it can be easily integrated to act as a payment method on any website.

How we built it

We started off with creating an Ethereum-based token which is a type of cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum network. We then deployed a smart contract which are essentially programs where the functions can be called through a transaction on the Ethereum network. However, since Ethereum has been largely growing in popularity due its spike in value and other large projects, continuous use of its services caused the network to be overwhelmed with transactions. Ethereum has a limited amount of transactions that can be processed at any given time, so it becomes a bidding war on whoever pays the highest transaction fee to get their transaction processed. Development on the Ethereum network is currently very expensive as many transactions need to be made in order to test and deploy smart contracts.

To workaround the issue of the large amounts of transaction fees, we are using the Cheap Ethereum network instead. Cheap Ethereum is a fork of the Ethereum blockchain where one Cheap Ethereum is worth 1000 times less than the one Ethereum. And because the value of CheapETH is much lower, it is less in demand allowing developers like us to be able to create smart contracts without worrying about paying those expensive transaction fees.

We are using the Solidity programming language which is built to create smart contracts and the official Ethereum IDE, Remix, to compile and deploy our smart contract onto the Cheap Ethereum Network. After deploying, the coins are generated but do not have any value yet. We used CheapSwap.io which is a decentralized exchange that uses the same code as the very popular Uniswap exchange. In order to add our currency to the site, we had to create a custom token list file which also included our coin logo. In the end, CheapSwap.io allowed us to back our PizzaCoin with CheapETH. Since CheapETH has value, our PizzaCoin now has value as well!

If you like to learn more about our project, please check out the Google Slide presentation as it goes more in depth into the development of our own cryptocurrency and what we learned about crypto!

Also, feel free to check out our GitHub repo to see the smart contract that we used and other files that we needed to complete the project.

Challenges we ran into

Since CheapETH only started in early February, there has been very little development done to the project. Tools such as block explorers and CheapSwap.io have limitations and issues that will most likely be fixed over the next few weeks or months as CheapETH matures. For example, the block explorers are able to detect errors that occur with a transaction or contract deployment but does not show the output of the error at all. CheapSwap.io also had an issue where the liquidation section of their web site would work the first time but shows a blank screen any time the page is refreshed or accessed again. However, the tools built for the original Ethereum network actually work very well since it has been around for many years and are usually open source. CheapETH seems to be taking the same approach in becoming an open source and hopefully will accelerate its development with help from the online community.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have successfully deployed an Ethereum smart contract to the Cheap Ethereum network where we can later deploy it on the original Ethereum network if we choose to do so. Also, we were able to liquidate PizzaCoin so that it contains real value backed by CheapETH. Most importantly, our main accomplishment has been achieved as we can now successfully make transactions using PizzaCoin to each other!

What we learned

We learned more about how the blockchain works in Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of mining and how transactions are processed on each network. Our team learned the fundamentals of the Solidity programming language and Remix IDE; tools that are commonly used for Ethereum projects such as this one.

What's next for Making a Cryptocurrency

We would like to try to integrate our project in a Discord bot or a website in order to easily trade our currency. Unfortunately, we do not have experience in creating a website or a bot and were not able to complete them within the given time restraint for this competition. After completing this project, we are definitely going to continue to develop on the Cheap Ethereum network and find other ways to utilize the Ethereum blockchain for our projects.

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