Write the Smart Contract

We’ll start our Dapp by writing the smart contract that acts as the back-end logic and storage.

You might have heard about ERC-20, which is a token standard in Ethereum. Tokens such as DAI and USDC implement the ERC-20 standard which allows them all to be compatible with any software that can deal with ERC-20 tokens. For the sake of simplicity, the token we're going to build does not implement the ERC-20 standard.

1. Create a new file named Token.sol in the contracts/ directorynote

2. Copy the following code:

// Solidity files have to start with this pragma.
// It will be used by the Solidity compiler to validate its version.
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;


// This is the main building block for smart contracts.
contract Token {
    // Some string type variables to identify the token.
    string public name = "My Hardhat Token";
    string public symbol = "MHT";

    // The fixed amount of tokens, stored in an unsigned integer type variable.
    uint256 public totalSupply = 1000000;

    // An address type variable is used to store ethereum accounts.
    address public owner;

    // A mapping is a key/value map. Here we store each account's balance.
    mapping(address => uint256) balances;

    // The Transfer event helps off-chain applications understand
    // what happens within your contract.
    event Transfer(address indexed _from, address indexed _to, uint256 _value);

    /**
     * Contract initialization.
     */
    constructor() {
        // The totalSupply is assigned to the transaction sender, which is the
        // account that is deploying the contract.
        balances[msg.sender] = totalSupply;
        owner = msg.sender;
    }

    /**
     * A function to transfer tokens.
     *
     * The `external` modifier makes a function *only* callable from *outside*
     * the contract.
     */
    function transfer(address to, uint256 amount) external {
        // Check if the transaction sender has enough tokens.
        // If `require`'s first argument evaluates to `false` then the
        // transaction will revert.
        require(balances[msg.sender] >= amount, "Not enough tokens");

        // Transfer the amount.
        balances[msg.sender] -= amount;
        balances[to] += amount;

        // Notify off-chain applications of the transfer.
        emit Transfer(msg.sender, to, amount);
    }

    /**
     * Read only function to retrieve the token balance of a given account.
     *
     * The `view` modifier indicates that it doesn't modify the contract's
     * state, which allows us to call it without executing a transaction.
     */
    function balanceOf(address account) external view returns (uint256) {
        return balances[account];
    }
}

The source code above is just an example to illustrate how your source code looks like. In practice, your source code may contain one or many files with complex structure.

Compiling

Solidity is a compiled language, meaning we need to compile our Solidity to bytecode for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to execute. Think of it as translating our human-readable Solidity into something the EVM understands.

Viction is EVM-compatible, which means that every contract written in Ethereum can be seamlessly ported to Viction without effort.

To compile the contract run npx hardhat compile in your terminal. The compile task is one of the built-in tasks.

npx hardhat compile

You should see output similar to the following:

$ npx hardhat compile
Compiling 1 file with 0.8.17
Compilation finished successfully