Creating a token on Solana is not one action. It is a short list of account writes, and several of those writes set values that no later transaction can change.
This workshop documents each write in order: what the mint account stores, which authorities keep their power after launch, where the name and the image really live, and which button on a launchpad quietly makes one of those decisions for you.
Five fields. Everything a holder can be subjected to later is decided by them.
Most of token creation is repairable. You can rename a token, replace an image, add liquidity, or hand a key to someone else. These six are the exceptions, and every one of them is made in the first minute by someone who is usually in a hurry.
Decimals is a single byte set by the initialise-mint instruction. There is no instruction to change it later. Getting it wrong does not break the token, but it permanently fixes how every interface and every integer amount reads.
A mint is owned either by the original SPL Token program or by Token-2022. The owner is fixed when the account is allocated. Moving a live token from one program to the other means a new mint and a new address.
Mint extensions such as transfer fees, transfer hooks or a permanent delegate are chosen while the mint is being created, because they change how much space the account needs. They cannot be bolted on afterwards.
Setting the mint authority to none ends the ability to create new units. That is usually the intent, and it is permanent. No key, including the one that just signed it, can restore the authority afterwards.
A freeze authority can only be assigned while the mint is being initialised. If it is left empty then, it can never be added. If it is set, it can be revoked once, and that revocation is also final.
Clearing the mutable flag on a metadata account seals the name, symbol and URI in place. It removes a risk and a repair path at the same time, and there is no instruction to unseal it.
Four notes carry most of the site. Each one starts from the accounts and instructions involved, marks every irreversible step before describing it, and ends by saying what the workshop has not tested.
The whole sequence from a fresh keypair to a tradable token: allocation, rent exemption, initialisation, the first mint into an associated token account, metadata, and where the sequence stops being reversible.
Open the head noteTwo optional keys inside the mint. One can print supply forever, the other can lock an individual holder out of transferring. What each actually controls, and what revoking each one does and does not prove.
Read the authorities noteThe name, the symbol and the image are not stored in the token. They sit in a separate derived account or in a mint extension, with hard length limits and an update authority that is usually still live.
Read the metadata noteA fixed order of checks that begins at the mint address and never at the ticker, because tickers are not unique and cost nothing to copy. Twelve fields, each with what a clean answer looks like.
Open the field guideMinting covers the mint account and the values written into it. Metadata covers everything that is displayed but not owned by the token program. Launchpads covers the shortcuts, and how to read what they produced.
The mint account is the token. Everything a holder can be subjected to later, dilution, freezing, a supply that keeps growing, is decided by fields written into that one account.
Open the benchA name and a symbol are not part of the token. They live in a separate account, or in a mint extension, owned by an update authority that can usually rewrite them at any time.
Open the benchA launchpad makes the same decisions you would make by hand, faster and out of sight. What it locks in on your behalf, and how any reader can check the result against the chain.
Open the benchNone of these needs a node, a subscription or a developer. Every one is visible on a public explorer once you have the mint address, and every one is a field this site explains in full somewhere.
Everything this workshop documents ends at the moment a token becomes tradable. That is the point where a different set of questions starts: how deep the pool is, how much turnover a pair shows on aggregator screens, and how much of that turnover was produced on purpose rather than by people arriving on their own.
Those questions are not part of token construction, but they are the reason many of the construction decisions get made in the first place. A team that expects a listing threshold picks a supply and a liquidity structure with that threshold in mind. A team that never thought about the market picks defaults and finds out later.
The workshop keeps the two apart deliberately. Construction facts come from the token programs and are checkable by anyone. Market activity is a commercial layer with its own tooling, its own pricing and its own claims, and it is described here as market structure rather than recommended.
Three rules decide what appears on these pages, and more often what does not.
Field names, account sizes, instruction names and limits are taken from the token programs and the metadata standard, not from a launch interface, a tooltip or a screenshot of one. Where an interface uses a friendlier word than the program does, both words appear so the reader can search either.
Where a number would depend on network conditions or a fee schedule that changes, it is labelled as illustrative arithmetic and the inputs are shown.
If a step cannot be undone, the warning sits above the instruction rather than in a note at the end. Notes that contain irreversible steps carry a list of them before the first section, so a reader who scrolls no further still sees the ones that matter.
Reversible steps are marked as reversible too, because treating everything as dangerous is its own kind of bad documentation.
The workshop explains how to read a token's authorities, extensions and metadata state so that a buyer can check them. It does not publish the opposite: nothing here describes how to hide a live mint authority, disguise a supply, fake a lock or make any of those checks return a misleading answer.
That line is not negotiable, and requests for the other side of it are declined rather than answered privately.
