Crypto Token Built in a Week
DYNA Coin was a BEP20 crypto token launched at the height of the ‘meme coin’ craze in May 2021. Together with a small but perfectly formed team we went from project kickoff to launch in less than one week.
The story
The beginning of 2021 saw explosive growth in the cryptocurrency world. Bitcoin was reaching new all time highs of $50k+, the NFT market was taking the world by storm and Elon Musk was tweeting about his love for DogeCoin. All of this led to a huge amount of new money pouring into the crypto market.
One of the most interesting trends at this time was the rise of meme coins; the definition of which was a crypto token with no defined utility. Most commonly they were meme based, with everything from grumpy cat to baby Yoda quickly getting turned into a tradable token.
After investing in a few of these meme coins I quickly saw the potential for profit, with many of them reaching 10x within a few hours of going live. I decided to pull together a small team that had the perfect skillset to create and launch our own meme coin. A full stack developer with crypto experience, a social media expert / community manager, and myself to cover all things design related. We set ourselves a goal of launching our coin within one week.
Creating a brand (day 1)
We began by brainstorming a name for our coin. I designed and facilitated a branding workshop with the team during which we looked at examples of meme coins that had been successful and identified the common trends within them.
We landed on DYNA (short for dynamite). It had the right amount of 'meme factor’ that would allow us to create shareable content around it, whilst also being short and punchy.
Building the hype (day 2 - 5)
The key to a successful coin launch is to build an engaged audience beforehand. To do this our community manager set up Telegram and Twitter accounts and began to drive people to them by tapping into existing communities who were interested in the meme coin trend. To help build engagement with these communities I created a set of GIFs that could be shared across our channels.
Site build (day 3 + 4)
To build credibility for our coin it was important to have a website that could house all of the information and links. I spent time researching what competitors were including in their site design and scrapped Twitter comments to understand what people were responding positively about.
Due to the tight timeframe we had set for ourselves I decided to go with a simple one page site design that would be easy to build responsively. I collaborated closely with our developer and we bounced ideas off each other to cut as much scope as possible whilst maintaining a high quality UX.
Launch (day 5)
We launched DYNA Coin on day five, a full two days ahead of the schedule we had set ourselves. By that point we had built up an engaged community of 300+ people on our Telegram channel who were ready to buy our coin and go out and shill (a term within crypto trading which means to encourage other people to buy a coin).
Just before launch I released a set of videos which explained the process of how to purchase DYNA Coin. These educational tools helped newbie investors and generated more hype as they were shared.
Impact
I’d like to say that all three of us became overnight millionaires after the launch, but unfortunately this didn’t happen. We did make some profit and at one point DYNA Coin had a market cap of over $200,000. But, as with 95% of these meme coins it was a short lived affair and a week later it was almost worthless. On the plus side it was a really fun ride and I learnt a huge amount about how the world of crypto works. Like that smart fella Aristotle said “We learn by doing”.