How to Fetch Newly Minted Tokens with Helius

Introduction

Solana memecoins have been making headlines lately, with $WIF breaking $3.5 billion and Boden reaching $300 million. Popcat and Wen recently surpassed the $350 million mark. Slerf has also surpassed all Ethereum-based exchanges in trading volume within its first day. After BONK's boom last November, Solana sees more new tokens being created than ever. There has been a double increase in the number of new tokens minted on-chain over the past three months using the Solana Program Library (SPL) Standard, as seen from Solscan data.

Source: Real-time newly minted SPL Tokens data by Solscan

This article explores how tokens are created on Solana, what SPL tokens are, and how to monitor new tokens and retrieve their metadata using Helius.

How are Tokens Created on Solana?

Solana supports both native SOL and other tokens. The Solana Program Library (SPL) defines common standards for fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Solana. Unlike Ethereum, where different standards are set for different types of non-fungible (ERC-721) and fungible tokens (ERC-20), the Solana Program Library doesn’t have a specially computed standard for the different token types.