Comparison
Cheapest Chain to Launch a Token
Solana, Base and Ethereum, priced on what the network itself charges to put a token on-chain — and on the costs that turn out to matter more than that once you add them up.
Short answer
Base is the cheapest of the three on network cost, and it is not close — its minimum base fee is 0.005 gwei, which puts a standard ERC-20 deployment in fractions of a cent. Solana is next, charging a rent deposit of a few thousandths of a SOL rather than a fee. The genuinely surprising entry is Ethereum mainnet, which spent 2026 at gas prices below one gwei and is no longer the expensive option people still describe it as.
The more useful finding is that on all three chains the network is now the smallest line on the bill. What you pay a deployment tool is larger, and the liquidity you have to deposit for the token to trade is larger again — usually by orders of magnitude. Picking a chain on deployment cost alone optimises the one number that stopped mattering.
Two different questions hide inside “cheapest”
Almost every disagreement about which chain is cheapest turns out to be two people answering different questions. One is asking what the blockchain charges to accept the transaction — gas on an EVM chain, rent and a base fee on Solana. The other is asking what the whole launch costs, which includes the tool that deploys the contract, the pool that makes the token tradeable, and the capital sitting in that pool.
Those two numbers used to move together, which is why the shorthand worked. In 2021, deploying an ERC-20 on Ethereum could cost hundreds of dollars in gas alone, and the network cost genuinely dominated everything else. That is no longer true anywhere. Layer 2s pushed EVM deployment costs into the cents, Solana was never expensive to begin with, and mainnet itself has fallen to a fraction of what it charged a year ago. The network line shrank while every other line stayed where it was.
So this page answers the narrow question first, precisely, because it is answerable — and then it says plainly how much of your actual budget that number represents.
What each network charges
| Category | Solana | Base | Ethereum |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the chain charges you | Rent-exempt deposits on new accounts, plus a 5,000-lamport base fee per signature | Gas — deployment gas units × gas price | Gas — the same gas units, at mainnet gas prices |
| Deployment cost, typical | ~0.0035 SOL in rent for the mint and token accounts, plus the metadata account | Roughly 0.000007–0.00007 ETH at a 0.005–0.05 gwei gas price | Roughly 0.0002 ETH at 0.177 gwei — but see the volatility row |
| Is it refundable? | Rent is a deposit, returned if an account is ever closed — but a live mint and its metadata are not closable in practice | No. Gas is spent | No. Gas is spent |
| Volatility of that number | Effectively fixed — rent is a formula on account size, not an auction | Narrow. Base sets a 0.005 gwei minimum base fee and rarely strays far above it | Wide. Sub-1 gwei through 2026, but the same deploy costs orders of magnitude more in a congestion spike |
| Who pays afterwards | Every holder pays a fraction of a cent per transfer | Every holder pays L2 gas — cents at most | Every holder pays mainnet gas, at whatever it costs that day |
Gas prices move, so the ETH figures above are worked examples at observed rates rather than quotes. The arithmetic behind them is in the next two sections, so you can recompute either one at whatever the gas price is when you read this.
The EVM side: one multiplication
A standard OpenZeppelin-based ERC-20 deployment consumes somewhere around 1.0 to 1.5 million gas units. That number is a property of the contract, not of the chain — the identical bytecode costs the identical gas on Base and on Ethereum mainnet. Everything that differs between the two is the price per unit.
Take 1.3 million gas as a working figure. On Base, whose minimum base fee is 0.005 gwei, that is 6,500 gwei — 0.0000065 ETH. Even at ten times the floor, a level Base rarely sustains, it is 0.000065 ETH. The number is small enough that it stops being worth thinking about, which is the point of an L2 and the reason Base became the default home for cheap experimental launches.
On Ethereum mainnet the same 1.3 million gas at the 0.177 gwei Etherscan showed on 31 August 2026 comes to 0.00023 ETH. That is not a typo and it is not an L2 figure — mainnet gas averaged roughly 0.052 gwei in April 2026, down from about 1.67 gwei a year earlier, after the Dencun, Pectra and Fusaka upgrades moved rollup data into blobs and most activity moved to rollups outright. Block utilisation on mainnet now sits well below its target, and the base fee follows utilisation down.
What that does not mean is that mainnet costs are settled. The base fee is still an auction, and the same deployment at 30 gwei — an unremarkable level during any period of real demand — costs 0.039 ETH, well over a hundred times the quiet-day figure. Base’s cost varies within a narrow band around its floor. Ethereum’s varies across two orders of magnitude, and it does so on someone else’s schedule. If you are launching on mainnet, the honest budgeting rule is to price the spike, not the median.
The Solana side: rent, not a fee
Solana prices storage rather than computation, which makes its costs unusually predictable. Creating an SPL token means creating accounts, and every account must hold a rent-exempt balance proportional to its size. The formula is fixed: take the account’s data size, add 128 bytes of account overhead, multiply by 3,480 lamports per byte-year, and multiply by two years.
A mint account is 82 bytes, which works out to 0.0014616 SOL. The associated token account that receives your supply is 165 bytes, which is 0.00203928 SOL. A Metaplex metadata account — the one that carries your token’s name, symbol and image URI — is larger again, and adds a few further thousandths of a SOL on the same formula. On top of all of it, the transaction itself costs 5,000 lamports per signature, which is 0.000005 SOL. There is no auction anywhere in that list, and no congestion multiplier.
The word “rent” matters here. These are deposits, not payments: close an account and the balance comes back. In practice that refund is theoretical for a token launch, because a mint holding a live supply is not something you close and a metadata account is not either. Treat the rent as spent — but know that it is a deposit against storage, which is why the number never moves, and why nobody on Solana talks about timing their deployment.
What the tooling costs, and why it is now the bigger half
Once network cost falls into fractions of a cent, whatever you pay to have the contract written, deployed and verified becomes the dominant line. That is worth stating flatly rather than burying, because it inverts the usual advice: the chain you pick barely affects your deployment bill, and the tool you pick almost entirely determines it.
Through this site, Solana token creation is 0.3 SOL. The revoke-mint, revoke-freeze and metadata-lock toggles are bundled into that same creation transaction at no extra charge when you leave them on. Revoking one of those authorities later, on a token that already exists, is a different path — it goes through the standalone tool and costs 0.1 SOL per authority. On Base and on Ethereum, ERC-20 creation is 0.03 ETH on either chain, plus that chain’s gas. The pricing page lists every action separately, including the ones that are genuinely free.
This page is not going to tell you that is the lowest price available, because it is not. Deployers that charge nothing at all exist — createmytoken.com covers Solana, Base and Ethereum at no charge and without a login, checked 1 September 2026 — and on a chain where gas is already fractions of a cent, a zero-fee deployer is a real option worth knowing about. What you are choosing between is a token deployed from a shared factory contract, whose bytecode is already verified because thousands of identical tokens preceded it, and a contract deployed from your own wallet with its own bytecode and its own verification. Both are legitimate. They are simply not the same product, and the fee difference is the whole of what separates them on price.
The costs that actually decide the budget
A deployed token that nobody can buy is an entry in a block explorer. Making it tradeable means a liquidity pool, and the deposit into that pool is where the money goes — typically by a margin that makes every fee on this page a rounding error. Nobody can quote that figure for you, because it is set by the price and market cap you are aiming at, not by the chain.
Pool creation has its own charges on top of the deposit. On Solana, a Raydium CPMM pool built through this site is 1.85 SOL in platform fee, and Raydium’s own program separately charges the creator about 0.19 SOL in new pool-account rent plus its fixed pool-creation fee — that second amount goes to Raydium, not to this site, and it is easy to under-budget because it never appears on a pricing page. On Base and Ethereum, adding Uniswap v2 liquidity is gas only.
Then there is the cost you never pay yourself. Every transfer of your token, forever, is paid by whoever is transferring it. On Solana and Base that is a fraction of a cent and nobody notices. On Ethereum mainnet it is whatever mainnet costs that day, borne by every holder on every trade — which is the real reason a small-cap token launched on mainnet struggles even when its deployment was cheap. Deployment is a one-off. Holder gas is permanent, and it is the line that quietly decides whether a token gets traded.
So which one should you use?
Base
The lowest network cost of the three, with the narrowest variance, and EVM tooling that already works. The right default if you want deployment cost to be a non-question and your audience is comfortable in a Coinbase-adjacent wallet.
Create Base Token →Solana
Costs that never move, sub-second finality, on-chain metadata built into the token standard, and the deepest retail liquidity for small tokens. The right pick when your buyers are already there.
Create Solana Token →Ethereum
No longer priced out, and still the venue with the deepest composability and the most credibility with institutions. Choose it for what mainnet gives you, budget for a gas spike, and remember your holders pay mainnet gas too.
Create Ethereum Token →Related
FAQ
What is the cheapest chain to launch a token on in 2026?
Measured purely on what the network charges to put the contract on-chain, Base is the cheapest of the three covered here — its minimum base fee is 0.005 gwei, so a standard ERC-20 deployment lands in the fractions-of-a-cent range and stays there. Solana is close behind, and its cost is a rent deposit on the new accounts rather than a fee. The more useful answer is that network cost stopped being the deciding number some time ago: on all three chains it is now smaller than whatever you pay a deployment tool, and far smaller than the liquidity you have to put in the pool for the token to trade at all.
Is Ethereum mainnet still too expensive to launch a token on?
That answer is more dated than most articles repeating it. Ethereum gas averaged about 0.052 gwei in April 2026, down from roughly 1.67 gwei a year earlier, and Etherscan showed 0.177 gwei on 31 August 2026 — the combined effect of the Dencun, Pectra and Fusaka upgrades and the migration of most activity onto rollups, with mainnet block utilisation sitting well under its target. At those levels a 1.3 million gas deployment costs a fraction of a thousandth of an ETH. What has not changed is the variance: mainnet is still an auction, and the same deployment during a congestion spike at 30 gwei costs on the order of a hundred times more. Ethereum is no longer priced out of a token launch; it is still the chain where the price of one can change while you are deciding.
How much does it cost to deploy an ERC-20 in gas?
A standard OpenZeppelin-based ERC-20 deployment consumes roughly 1.0 to 1.5 million gas units. That figure is a property of the contract, not the chain — it is the same on Base as on Ethereum mainnet. What differs is the price per unit. Multiply the gas units by the gas price in gwei, divide by a billion, and you have the cost in ETH: 1.3 million gas at 0.05 gwei is 0.000065 ETH; the same deployment at 30 gwei is 0.039 ETH. That single multiplication is the whole of the chain-cost question for any EVM chain.
Why is Solana priced in rent instead of gas?
Solana charges for storage rather than computation. Creating a token means creating accounts — a mint account, a token account to hold the supply, and a metadata account — and each must hold a rent-exempt balance proportional to its size. The formula is the account's data size plus 128 bytes of overhead, multiplied by 3,480 lamports per byte-year, multiplied by two years. A mint account is 82 bytes, so 0.0014616 SOL; a token account is 165 bytes, so 0.00203928 SOL. On top of that the transaction itself costs 5,000 lamports per signature. The deposits are recoverable in principle if an account is closed, which is why calling them a fee is not quite right — though a mint with a live supply is not something you close.
Does the cheapest chain also make the cheapest launch?
Rarely, because the chain is the smallest line on the bill. A launch that anyone can trade needs liquidity in a pool, and that deposit is usually orders of magnitude larger than every fee on this page combined. Pool creation carries its own costs too — a Raydium CPMM pool on Solana charges Raydium's own rent and pool-creation fee of about 0.19 SOL, separately from anything a deployment tool charges. Choose the chain your buyers are actually on, then budget for liquidity; the deployment cost will not be what decides whether the launch works.
What does it cost to launch through CoinDevTools on each chain?
Solana token creation is 0.3 SOL, with the revoke-mint, revoke-freeze and metadata-lock toggles bundled into that same transaction at no extra charge when you leave them on; revoking one of those authorities later, on a token that already exists, goes through the standalone tool and costs 0.1 SOL per authority. Base and Ethereum token creation is 0.03 ETH on either chain, plus that chain's gas. Raydium CPMM pool creation on Solana is 1.85 SOL in platform fee, plus Raydium's own ~0.19 SOL. Full per-action pricing is on the pricing page.