Ethereum ÐApps for Web Developers - Writing Your Own Currency

Edit in 2015: I’m keeping this up for historical reasons. Although most of the concepts are the same this tutorial won’t work anymore with recent Ethereum versions.

We are currently working hard on Ethereum’s fifth proof-of-concept release. This release is centered around extendablity and adds important features like a public Javascript (or Go) and JSON-RPC APIs.

With these additions it becomes easier for people familiar with web development technologies to start writing distributed applications (ÐApps) on top of Ethereum.

This post will walk you through the process of building a small ÐApp: your very own alt-coin build on top of Ethereum. Everybody who knows his way around Javascript & HTML / CSS and who has read (or at least glanced at) the Ethereum whitepaper should be able to successfuly complete this tutorial. I won’t be using any external Javascript libraries in this tutorial to keep things easy to understand but please note that you can use jQuery, Angular and any other extension and it will work just fine.

At the end of this tutorial you will have an app that looks something like this.

Let’s get started!