Cheapest blockchain to deploy a token, live USD cost across 21 L1 and L2 chains

The live USD cost to create a fungible token on each of the 21 tracked chains, refreshed every 5 minutes, using each chain's canonical and most used method. ERC20 contract deployment for EVM chains, SPL mint plus ATA plus Metaplex metadata account for Solana, Move publish for Sui and Aptos, TokenFactory MsgCreateDenom for Osmosis Injective Neutron, native asset minting policy for Cardano, two account asset issuance for Stellar.

13 EVM chains (Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Optimism, Base, Blast, Mantle, opBNB, Celo, Arbitrum, Scroll, Linea) plus 8 non EVM chains (Solana, Sui, Aptos, Osmosis, Injective, Neutron, Cardano, Stellar). Twenty one in total.

As fair as the underlying chains allow. Token creation means structurally different things in each ecosystem. We do not pretend the numbers are perfectly equivalent. Instead we publish exactly what the canonical and most used method costs in dollars on each chain, plus the formula and inputs for every value so readers can adjust. The methodology field lists the precise method per chain.

Two of the three inputs are live and volatile. Gas units stay near 555 thousand for the canonical OpenZeppelin v5 ERC20 bytecode. Gas price moves with network congestion (around 0.5 gwei during calm periods in 2026, 20 to 80 gwei during normal load, over 100 gwei during peak congestion). ETH USD price moves independently. Cost equals gas times gas price times ETH price, so a 100x gas price swing dominates everything. The bench publishes the actual current cost, not a historical average. Open the chart for a fair view across the day.

These TokenFactory chains have set their denom_creation_fee parameter to an empty list, meaning the only cost is the gas to execute MsgCreateDenom (roughly one tenth of a cent at current gas prices, well below our display precision). We render this as less than zero point zero zero one dollar with a tooltip explaining no protocol level creation fee. Injective by contrast charges a flat zero point one INJ for a tokenfactory denom.

Yes. Earlier versions of the benchmark only counted the bare 82 byte mint account rent, which understated the realistic cost by about 2.5 times. The current methodology also includes the 165 byte Associated Token Account for the initial holder and the 679 byte Metaplex Token Metadata account that holds name, symbol and URI. EVM ERC20 deployments embed name and symbol in the contract storage natively (which is why the EVM gas figure is over half a million), so adding the Solana metadata account is the apples to apples adjustment. A bare mint without metadata would not be discoverable in Phantom, Jupiter or any wallet UI.

The Cardano min UTxO formula is deterministic. The coins_per_utxo_size protocol parameter is set by governance and moves rarely. A standard native asset bundle (32 byte policy hash plus short asset name) sits around 70 bytes, and the on chain mint transaction fee is a few cents of ADA. The USD figure on the leaderboard moves with ADA price, not with congestion.

Two paths depending on the rollup. Arbitrum Nitro: the chain bakes the L1 component into the returned gas via NodeInterface, so the plain eth_estimateGas figure already covers most of it (caveat: under L1 congestion the public RPC undercounts the L1 component by 10 to 50 percent and would need the explicit gasEstimateL1Component call). OP Stack rollups (Optimism, Base, Blast, Mantle, opBNB, Celo): eth_estimateGas returns L2 execution only, and we add the L1 data fee via OVM_GasPriceOracle.getL1Fee at 0x420000000000000000000000000000000000000F on the deploy calldata. Scroll, Linea and zkSync embed the data cost directly in their gas accounting.

The canonical OpenZeppelin v5.0.2 ERC20 source and its compiled artifact (solc 0.8.24, optimizer runs 200) live in the harness directory under contracts/Token.sol and contracts/Token.json. The same bytecode is shipped to every EVM chain, so the cross chain gas comparison is on identical contract code. Reproduce locally with forge build and verify against the embedded constant in cmd/script/evm.go.

Yes. Every number is a live Prometheus query against the OpenChainBench gateway. The harness source is open at the link in the source field below. Cite the value, the chain and the timestamp at the top of the page.

Because deploying a token is a one off decision and the operator wants the cost at the time of decision, not last quarter's average. The bench is the only public source that publishes this number live with reproducible methodology. Static blog posts go stale within hours when gas prices move.