Crypto Basics

A blockchain is a shared digital record — a ledger — that keeps track of transactions and ownership, maintained not by a single company or bank, but by a large network of independent computers (called nodes or validators) all over the world. Instead of one central authority updating the records, thousands of participants agree on what happened and when, and once something is recorded, it becomes extremely difficult to change or remove.

This is why blockchain transactions are described as "irreversible" — once a transaction is confirmed and added to the chain, there's no customer service line to call to undo it. That's very different from a bank transfer, which can sometimes be reversed or disputed. It also means no single company — including Unilaunch — has the ability to freeze, reverse, or recover a transaction on your behalf.

You can launch a token on nine chains today: Solana, Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Blast, and Robinhood Chain. Monad and Tempo are part of the platform but still being integrated — they appear in the network picker marked "Soon" and can't be selected yet. Each chain is a separate, independent network with its own native currency, its own speed, and its own fee structure — think of them as separate digital economies that don't directly talk to one another.

A crypto wallet is the tool you use to hold, send, and receive crypto assets, and to interact with blockchain applications like Unilaunch. Importantly, a wallet doesn't actually "store" your funds the way a physical wallet stores cash — your funds live on the blockchain itself. What your wallet really stores are your keys, which prove that you're the owner and let you authorize transactions.

A "self-custodial" wallet — the kind Unilaunch works with — means that you, and only you, hold those keys. No company, exchange, or platform can access your funds or move them without your direct approval. This is different from keeping funds on a centralized exchange, where the exchange itself holds the keys and you're trusting them to manage your funds correctly.

Unilaunch connects to Phantom and Solflare for Solana, and to MetaMask and Trust Wallet for the EVM chains (Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Blast, and Robinhood Chain).

Every wallet is built around a pair of keys:

• Your public key (or wallet address) is like your bank account number — you can share it freely with others so they can send you funds, or so a platform like Unilaunch can see your public address.
• Your private key is like the PIN and signature combined — it's what actually authorizes transactions, and it must never be shared with anyone.

Most modern wallets represent your private key through a seed phrase (also called a recovery phrase) — a sequence of usually 12 or 24 ordinary words, generated when you first set up your wallet.

A few rules to live by:

• Never type your seed phrase into a website, including Unilaunch. No tool on Unilaunch ever asks for a seed phrase or a private key.
• Never share it with "support staff," no matter how official they seem.
• Write it down on paper and store it somewhere private and safe — not in a screenshot, a notes app, or an email to yourself.
• If you ever land on a page asking for your seed phrase unexpectedly, close it immediately.

Each blockchain has a native currency — the asset used to pay network fees and act as the base unit of that chain. On the chains Unilaunch supports, that means:

• SOL on Solana.
• ETH on Ethereum, and on the chains that settle in ether: Base, Arbitrum, Blast, and Robinhood Chain.
• BNB on BNB Chain.
• POL on Polygon.
• AVAX on Avalanche.

A token, on the other hand, is an asset created on top of a blockchain, using that chain's rules and standards, rather than being the chain's base currency. When you create a token using Unilaunch, you're creating this second kind of asset — one that lives on an existing blockchain (like Solana or Ethereum) and follows its technical standard, while your wallet still needs the chain's native currency to pay for the transaction that creates it.

A token standard is a common technical format that a blockchain and its wallets, exchanges, and applications all agree to follow, so that tokens behave predictably and are compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. Common standards include:

• SPL and Token-2022 on Solana.
• ERC-20 on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains.
• BEP-20 on BNB Chain.

When you create a token through Unilaunch, it's built to the standard used by whichever blockchain you choose, so it can be recognized by wallets, viewed on block explorers, and traded on compatible platforms right away.

"Gas" is the fee paid to the network of validators who process and confirm your transaction. Think of it as a small toll paid for the computing work involved in verifying and permanently recording what you're doing on the blockchain. Gas is paid in the native currency of that specific chain, and its cost changes depending on how busy the network is at any given moment — the more people are transacting at once, the higher fees tend to rise, and vice versa.

Gas fees are separate from, and in addition to, the Unilaunch Tool Fee charged for the use of a specific feature. The Tool Fee is quoted in the native currency of the chain you picked, and the interface adds it up for you before you pay.

A smart contract is a program that lives on a blockchain and runs automatically according to rules written into its code, without needing a person or company to manually execute it each time. When you create a token, add liquidity, or use most tools on Unilaunch, you're actually interacting with smart contracts behind the scenes — some written by Unilaunch, and others belonging to third-party protocols your transaction touches (such as a liquidity platform).

Smart contracts can be reviewed and tested, but like any software, they can still contain bugs or unexpected behavior — which is one of the many reasons to only ever transact amounts you're comfortable with, and to take security seriously.

For people to be able to buy or sell a token freely, there usually needs to be a liquidity pool — a smart contract holding a reserve of two assets that anyone can trade between. When someone buys your token from the pool, they add the paired asset and remove some of your token, shifting the balance and, with it, the price — and vice versa when someone sells.

On Unilaunch the pool is always paired against the native currency of the chain you launched on — your token against SOL on Solana, against ETH on Base, against POL on Polygon, and so on. You set it up while creating the token, by entering how many tokens to put in the pool, how much of the native coin to pair them with, and the swap fee traders will pay. After that, unilaunch.lol/liquidity-pool is where you top the pool up or withdraw from it.

The relative amounts of each asset in the pool at any given time determine the current price. A "deep" pool (with a lot of value locked in it) tends to have more stable pricing, while a "shallow" pool can see prices swing dramatically with even modest trades.

The swap fee is what traders pay on every trade against your pool, split between you and the pool itself. Unilaunch lets you pick one of four rates — 0.25%, 1%, 2%, or 4% — while you're configuring the pool. It is written in when the pool is created and cannot be changed afterward, so it's worth a moment's thought: a low fee is friendlier to traders, a high one earns more per trade but can discourage trading.

Slippage is the gap between the price you expected when you submitted a transaction and the price you actually got once it was confirmed. It happens because prices in a liquidity pool can shift in the time between when you submit a trade and when it's finalized — especially in fast-moving markets or pools with limited liquidity.

Unilaunch's own tools don't ask you to set a slippage tolerance — creating a token and funding a pool are fixed amounts you enter yourself. Slippage matters once your token is trading: most wallets and exchange interfaces let whoever is trading set a maximum tolerance, so their transaction fails rather than executing at a price far worse than expected.

• Total supply is the total number of units of a token that exist (or that can ever exist, if mint authority has been revoked).
• Market capitalization ("market cap") is generally calculated as the token's current price multiplied by its circulating supply — a rough measure of the token's total value, though it can be misleading for tokens with very low liquidity.
• Decimals determine how divisible a token is, similar to how a currency can be divided into cents. Unilaunch's creation form takes a single digit from 0 to 9, and a token with 9 decimals can be divided into billionths.

On Solana, a token is created with three authorities, and you can permanently give any of them up ("revoke" them) while configuring the token:

• Mint authority allows whoever holds it to create additional units of the token in the future, increasing the total supply.
• Freeze authority allows whoever holds it to freeze specific token accounts, preventing them from sending or receiving that token.
• Update authority allows whoever holds it to change the token's metadata — its name, image, and links — after creation.

Many communities view revoking these as a signal of trustworthiness, since it means the supply can never be silently inflated, accounts can never be frozen, and the metadata can never be quietly rewritten. Once revoked, this cannot be undone.

The EVM chains work the other way around: instead of revoking authorities, you choose which capabilities the contract exposes — Burnable, Mintable, or Pausable — and whatever you leave switched off simply isn't written into the contract. Those choices are also final, since they can't be added later.

A block explorer is a website that lets anyone search and view the public data recorded on a blockchain — transactions, wallet addresses, token contracts, and more. Because blockchains are public by design, you (or anyone else) can look up a token's contract address, see every transaction it has ever been part of, and verify details like its total supply or whether mint and freeze authority have been revoked.

Once your launch resolves, Unilaunch offers a link straight to your token on the explorer for that chain — Solscan for Solana, Etherscan for Ethereum, BaseScan, BscScan, PolygonScan, Arbiscan, Snowtrace, or Blastscan for the others. Robinhood Chain is the one exception: it has no public explorer yet, so there's no link to follow there.

Understanding these basics helps you use Unilaunch — and crypto in general — with confidence rather than guesswork. Every transaction you make is permanent, every fee is real, and every wallet you connect is entirely under your own control and responsibility. Taking the time to understand these fundamentals is one of the best things you can do before creating your first token or adding your first liquidity pool.

When you're ready to put these concepts into practice, head over to our guide at unilaunch.lol/getting-started for a step-by-step walkthrough, or visit unilaunch.lol/create-token to begin.

If anything here is unclear, or you'd like a concept explained further, you're always welcome to browse our knowledge base at unilaunch.lol/knowledge-base, open a ticket at unilaunch.lol/open-ticket, or reach out to us directly at support@unilaunch.lol.