A Developer Asked AI to Name and Launch a Memecoin—It Raked In $12 Million In One Day

An anonymous Ethereum developer has released code that he says instructs artificial intelligence tools to deploy new ERC-20 tokens.

In a post on Tuesday, Twitter user @CroissantEth explained how he combined OpenAI’s ChatGPT API with his own script to allow the chatbot to create real, digital coins automatically.

“In essence, it asks ChatGPT to form an ERC20 token using Open Zeppelin standards,” explained the developer. Open Zeppelin is an open-source framework for building secure smart contracts, containing libraries of contracts written in Solidity – Ethereum’s programming language.

“The token name and other parameters are designed to be passed in by values given by GPT in the code's constructor,” he added.

So far, Croissant said he’s launched one public token using the tool: AstroPepeX (APX), which is available for trading on Uniswap. The new memecoin has already raked in $12.9 million in trading volume over the past 24 hours.

The name wasn’t pulled from thin air: ChatGPT based the names it generates on real data from the top ten thousand tokens traded on Uniswap, and cross-referenced them with market-cap data from CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.

Some of the bot’s testnet runs generated coins titled “Inuverse” and “QuantumPepe”—other clear references to commonly known memecoins and ideas like Dogecoin, Pepe, and the metaverse.

"The number of Pepe generations were quite funny, and it was super cool to see where GPT actually input real creativity in the data," said Croissant in a message to Decrypt. "It started to feel like it was growing a mind of its own."

Croissant explained that other token specifics—such as token supply—can be directly configured, or left up to ChatGPT's own creativity. More complex parameters, he said, are "definitely possible."

"What I did was introduce GPT to the standard ERC20 contract for simplicity, as I felt that was safe for a first attempt at this," he said. "Someone could just as well introduce some sort of special configuration with their own solidity code to make it mintable, introduce a tax rate, or even governance parameters."

After generating a name and description for the coin, ChatGPT fed both to DALL-E—another OpenAI tool for image generation – to create an appropriate icon for the coin.

Croissant designed his tool so that ownership of any contract generated by ChatGPT is immediately revoked, and that all token supply is added to Uniswap liquidity upon creation, along with 2 Ether (ETH).

Back in May, digital artist Rhett Mankind said he had given ChatGPT instructions to generate a memecoin called TURBO, which went on to surpass a $50 million market cap. However, fewer elements of the token’s creation—such as its name, and the removal of ownership rights—were automated.

Croissant told Decrypt that his project was largely inspired by Turbo, but modified to involve even less human intervention.

"I read the turbo thread and saw how he did the process manually, and as a natural developer, I started looking into how to do this process automatically," he said.

"GPT actually wrote the contract code for us, based on the erc20 contract standards we provided for it in the script," he continued. "Turbo did everything manually without feeding any data and training it to be any more knowledgeable on crypto."

Croissant said he plans to publish a user interface for his code, allowing non-technical experts to launch tokens on Ethereum using ChatGPT. Other tokens, however, have already been generated by the tool with help from Croissant's more tech-savvy followers.

"I’ve seen at least 20 derivative projects from scanning local blockchain contract deployments, had several people reach out telling me they used the script successfully," he said. "Once a UI is built, I expect this number to grow massively."