Deploy ERC-20 Token

How to deploy an ERC-20 Token that hooks into the Forte Rules Engine

Introduction

In this guide, you will learn how to deploy an ERC-20 token contract that hooks into the Forte Rules Engine. The approach will leverage Open Zeppelin’s version 4.9.6 contracts package. This guide will deploy to the Base Sepolia testnet, which requires you to have some testnet ETH available.

Get Started

If you’ve already completed the ERC-721 NFT Quickstart, you can skip the next steps and jump to the Deploy ERC-20 Token section.

Create a copy of this template repository in your own github account by navigating here: https://github.com/forte-service-company-ltd/fre-tokens-quickstart and clicking the “Use this template” button on GitHub.

Next, clone the freshly created repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/<YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME>/fre-tokens-quickstart

Open in Code Editor

cd fre-tokens-quickstart
npm install
forge install
cursor .

Setting up the .env File

The project includes a sample.env to get you started. Copy that to a new file named .env and fill in the values.

cp sample.env .env

.env

ETH_RPC_URL=
PRIV_KEY=
TOKEN_ADMIN=
ETHERSCAN_API_KEY=

Environment variable details

ETH_RPC_URL - You can get this from a platform such as Alchemy or Infura. For this demo you’ll need an RPC that points to the Base Sepolia testnet.

PRIV_KEY - This is the private key of a development wallet you control with some testnet ETH on the Base Sepolia network.

TOKEN_ADMIN - This is the public wallet address of an account that will have admin privileges on the token contract you deploy. For simplicity this could be the public address that is paired with the PRIV_KEY variable above.

ETHERSCAN_API_KEY - This is optional, but is easy to obtain and enables some easier website based interaction with your token contract. You can create a free API key by logging into https://basescan.org/ and navigating to the API Keys section.

Next, make your environment variables available to the command line for running the scripts to deploy your token contract.

source .env

Deploy ERC-20 Token

An example ERC-20 contract named QuickstartERC20.sol is available in the /src directory. You can open it up to take a closer look and even apply customizations to meet your needs. Once you’re ready to deploy the contract you can do so with the following command (run from the same terminal window you sourced the .env file within).

forge script script/QuickstartERC20.s.sol:DeployQuickstartERC20 --rpc-url $ETH_RPC_URL --private-key $PRIV_KEY --broadcast --verify

This will deploy the contract to the Base Sepolia testnet and publish the source code for it to https://sepolia.basescan.org. The terminal where you run the above command will include output similar to the following:

example output

[⠊] Compiling...
[⠑] Compiling 11 files with Solc 0.8.27
[⠘] Solc 0.8.27 finished in 1.64s
Compiler run successful!
Script ran successfully.

== Logs ==
  QuickstartERC20 deployed at: 0x_YOUR_CONTRACT_ADDRESS

Notice the highlighted line that indicates the deployed contract address. You can search that on the testnet explorer and even interact with it via the contract tab.

Test the Mint Function

The mint function is only callable by the TOKEN_ADMIN you previously set in the environment file. Test out calling this function and minting yourself some test tokens.

cast send 0x_YOUR_CONTRACT_ADDRESS "mint(address,uint256)" $TOKEN_ADMIN 10000000000000000000000 --private-key $PRIV_KEY --rpc-url $ETH_RPC_URL

Check Balance

You’ll see some output in the terminal indicating the status of the contract call. When successful you can refresh the transactions tab on the testnet explorer to see your transaction indexed there as well.

Check the balance of your wallet to ensure those tokens were minted:

cast call 0x_YOUR_CONTRACT_ADDRESS "balanceOf(address)(uint256)" $TOKEN_ADMIN --rpc-url $ETH_RPC_URL

Next Steps

Now that you have a rules ready ERC-20 token deployed it’s time to deploy the client specific contracts that connect this token to the Forte Rules Engine!