How to Launch a Meme Coin in 2024: The Easy Way

The meme coin market supercycle is starting, and it could be a huge opportunity for meme coin creators who have a viral idea to tokenize. New meme coins in this cycle have raised millions of dollars in early investment and exploded higher after hitting exchanges.

If you haven’t created a meme coin before, don’t worry. The process of developing meme coins is relatively easy. There are two key phases involved: creating your meme coin and then launching it.

In this guide, we’ll walk through both steps and explain how to launch a meme coin in 2024.

Step 1: Define Your Meme Coin Concept

A successful meme coin starts with a great idea. You need to decide what your meme coin is all about. Is it a token version of an existing meme currency? A meme coin to support a specific social cause? A utility token designed to reward early adopters?

Make sure that whatever your idea is, it will appeal to a relatively wide range of meme coin investors and traders. It can be very helpful to define your target audience and then tailor your token to meet their needs and expectations. Building on existing popular themes—like doge, pepe, cats, or degen culture—is usually a good bet.

Once you have an idea in place, you can make it stand out by designing a logo for your token and coming up with a catchy ticker symbol. You can also begin designing marketing materials at this stage, although we’ll cover marketing in more depth in Step 6.

Step 2: Choose a Blockchain for Your Token

Next, you need to decide which blockchain you plan to launch your meme coin on. There are a few popular options that we’ll explain so you can decide which is right for your token.

Ethereum

The Ethereum blockchain was long the #1 home for meme coins, and it’s still host to major tokens like $PEPE. The benefit of the Ethereum network is that it’s highly reliable and secure—you can count on Ethereum to handle your token’s trading volume no matter how big it gets.

On the other hand, Ethereum is slower than other blockchains and has much higher transaction fees. That can make it less profitable for investors to buy your meme coin, so you might end up with a smaller audience.

Solana

Solana is now the most popular blockchain for meme coin development and launches. It boasts very fast transaction speeds and significantly lower transaction costs compared to Ethereum. Solana’s popularity among meme coin creators also means that it’s where investors go to look for new tokens—so your meme coin could get some built-in publicity.

The Solana blockchain isn’t as developed as the Ethereum chain is, so it doesn’t offer quite the same level of reliability or security. However, outages on Solana are very rare and the blockchain has never experienced a serious security breach.

Binance Smart Chain

Binance Smart Chain is a blockchain backed by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. If you aim to get your meme coin listed on Binance eventually, launching on BSC is one of the best ways to get there (although it’s not a requirement).

Binance Smart Chain is in between Solana and Ethereum in terms of speed and transaction fees, and it boasts similar security and reliability to Ethereum. However, it’s a less popular blockchain overall than either Solana or Ethereum, so it may not be the first place investors go looking for new meme coins.

Step 3: Generate a Smart Contract

Your meme coin’s smart contract is the code that defines your token. It covers everything from how many tokens exist in your supply to what those tokens do.

If you have development skills, you can write your token’s smart contract yourself. This is often required for meme coins that have utility or special attributes, such as scheduled token burns or staking pools. You can also hire a developer to help you write your token’s smart contract.

Alternatively, if you’re just building a basic meme coin with no utility, you can use a smart contract generation tool. These don’t require any coding, so they’re perfect for first-time meme coin creators.

For tokens on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain, you can use Web3Toolkit to generate a new token smart contract in seconds. Just enter your token name, symbol, total supply, and logo, then pay a small fee to deploy your token’s contract.

For meme coins on Solana, you can use Pump.fun. You won’t pay anything up front, but Pump.fun will take a transaction fee every time your token is traded. Pump.fun has helped launch more than 3 million meme coins on Solana.

Step 4: Audit Your Token’s Contract

Whether you created your meme coin’s smart contract on your own or you used a smart contract generation tool, it’s a good idea to send the smart contract code for a third-party audit. This gives potential investors in your token confidence that it’s safe.

Popular smart contract auditing platforms include CertiK, SolidProof, and Coinsult. Each auditing platform charges a fee for checking over your smart contract. You’ll receive a certificate indicating that your token has been audited, which you can display on your project’s website.

Step 5: Write a Whitepaper

While not required, writing a whitepaper for your new meme coin is another important step to ensure it’s a success. Your crypto whitepaper is a public-facing document that describes what your token is all about

In your whitepaper, be sure to speak directly to your target audience. Why should they buy your token? Cover any unique selling points that help it stand out from other meme coins. You can also cover your project’s tokenomics and highlight the experience of you and any other founding team members.

Be sure to include eye-catching imagery that reflects your meme coin’s theme. This helps your whitepaper appeal to investors and ensures all of your marketing materials are aligned.

Step 6: Build a Marketing Strategy

Perhaps the most challenging part of launching a meme coin project is designing and executing a marketing strategy. You need to not only let the meme coin investment world know about your new token, but also convince investors that they should buy it.

Your marketing strategy should build on the original concept for your token that you laid out in Step 1. Lean into the attributes that make your token unique and repeatedly communicate those selling points to an active community of potential investors.

As for where to reach investors, start on social media. X, Telegram, Discord, and Reddit are all very popular among meme coin investors. Create accounts for your meme coin projects and provide frequent updates to keep potential investors engaged.

Options for Launching a Meme Coin

Now you’re ready for phase 2: launching your meme coin during a supercycle. There are a few different ways to approach this, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. We’ll cover each in detail so you can decide which approach to take.

Meme Coin Presale

Holding a presale for your meme coin is one of the best and most popular ways to launch. In a presale, you offer tokens to the public at a discounted price before they begin trading on exchanges. Presale investors cannot sell their token until the presale ends and the token begins trading.

The best crypto presales include many meme coins, some of which have raised tens of millions of dollars in token sales. For example, Pepe Unchained raised more than $36 million through a presale that lasted several months.

Presales have the benefit of incentivizing investors to join as early as possible by rewarding them with lower prices. This creates momentum for your meme coin launch when you need it the most. As your presale goes on, you can raise your token’s price in stages to raise more money and put pressure on investors who have been sitting on the sidelines to join.

Fair Launch

A fair launch is another approach to launching a meme coin that aims to distribute tokens as fairly as possible to early investors. Fair launches usually occur as airdrops in which early participants in a project receive tokens proportional to their participation.

For example, you could hold a fair launch that distributes tokens to anyone who has followed your project on social media and connected their wallet to your project site. The number of tokens each wallet receives could be determined by how much they’ve interacted with your project on social media platforms or how many people they have referred to your project.

Fair launches are very effective at distributing tokens, but they’re much less effective at raising money for your project’s treasury. As a result, they’re not very popular for launching new meme coins.

Crypto Launchpad

Crypto launchpads are digital incubators that help you market your project and raise funds from early investors. They provide a lot of the necessary infrastructure for conducting a launch, such as a payments smart contract and token management tools. They also spread the word about your token on their own social media channels, which may have a large following.

In many cases, launchpads have members who get exclusive early access to your project. This can help you raise more money from a highly engaged audience, but it also means that your token won’t be available to all potential meme coin investors. So, you could miss out on token sales.

In addition, launchpads often take a cut of every token sale as a transaction fee. This reduces the overall amount you can raise. As a result, crypto launchpads are mainly used by token creators who have a pre-existing relationship with a platform or who need a lot of help with marketing their new token.

Decentralized Exchange Launch

A decentralized exchange (DEX) launch involves listing your meme coin on a DEX without any prior distribution. DEX launches are a sub-type of fair launch since they’re open to anyone and can be quite effective at distributing your token.

Many successful meme coins, including $PEPE and $PNUT, have used DEX launches. However, this approach is risky, especially if you’re still in the early stages of your marketing campaign. Investors may not know to look for your token on a specific DEX, so your launch could be underwhelming. If that happens, investors who do find your token will see low trading volume and a lack of price action and could be scared off from buying.

DEX launches work best if you already have a large following for your token, and you don’t need to raise money for your project.

How to Launch a New Meme Coin

As we explained above, holding a presale for your new meme coin is the best approach for most creators. So, we’ll walk you through the steps to launch meme coins with a presale.

Step 1: Create a Presale Website

In order to launch a crypto presale, you need a website. This is where potential investors will go to find out more about your project and to actually buy your token.

You can create a website from scratch, but the easier approach is to use a website builder. These eliminate the need for manual coding and give you tons of flexibility to create an eye-catching site that will draw in investors.

When building your website, remember that it is part of your project’s marketing strategy. Your content should highlight your token’s unique selling points and speak directly to your target audience. You can also host your token’s whitepaper and smart contract audit certificates on your project site.

Step 2: Deploy a Payment Smart Contract

Crucially, you need a payment smart contract to accept payments from investors and distribute tokens to them in return.

Coding a payment smart contract yourself is extremely challenging, so we recommend using a service like Web3Payments.

Web3Payments offers bespoke payment smart contracts for any crypto presale, so you can define how long your presale should last and how frequently the price should increase. You can also offer staking rewards for early investors to further incentivize them to join your presale.

With Web3Payments, investors can pay for your token using more than 200 cryptocurrencies or even credit and debit cards. You and your investors can feel confident that payments are completely secure.

Step 3: Integrate Web3Payments into Your Presale Website

Web3Payments offers a user-friendly payment widget that integrates right into your presale website. It’s compatible with any custom website, including sites created with builders like Shopify or Wix.

You’ll receive support throughout the integration process to ensure that the payments widget matches your site’s theme. To ensure investors see it as soon as they land on your presale site, display the widget at the top of your site.

When you’re ready to launch, just let the team at Web3Payments know, and they’ll activate your payments smart contract so you can start accepting investments.

Conclusion

Launching a meme coin is relatively easy. All you need is an idea, and then you can create your token and launch it with a presale. There are even tools to help, like token smart contract generators and Web3Payments for accepting payments during your presale.

Need inspiration for your meme coin? Check out our guide to the best meme coins on the market today.

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