Making the Icon
A token icon is displayed at 20 to 24 pixels in a wallet balance row, which is the size at which it does its actual work. Everything else — the 256-pixel version in the repository, the 512-pixel version on the project page — is a downscale target. Design for the 20-pixel render, then produce the eight files the registrars ask for from one vector source.
Constraints that come from the render size#
- One mark, no wordmark. The symbol is already printed next to the icon in every interface that shows it. Lettering inside a 20-pixel square is four or five pixels tall and resolves to a smear.
- Stroke weight at or above 6% of the canvas. A 256-pixel canvas wants strokes of 16 pixels or more, which land at about 1.25 pixels in a 20-pixel row; below about 13 pixels the downscale drops them under one pixel and the antialiaser turns them into grey haze.
- Two colors, high contrast. Gradients average out at small sizes, so a gradient icon renders as its mean color and stops being distinguishable from every other icon whose mean is a similar blue.
- Give the mark its own disc. Surfaces disagree about their background: Etherscan is light, most wallets default to dark, and a transparent icon that is pure black or pure white vanishes on one of them. A filled circle behind the mark makes the icon background-independent and also survives the circular cropping several wallets apply.
- Keep the mark inside 80% of the canvas. Interfaces that crop to a circle cut the corners off a square icon, and MetaMask’s icon style guide asks for artwork “within 80% of the canvas”. The background disc is not artwork in that sense; the mark on it is.
The source file#
Author in SVG and rasterize from it. A hand-drawn 256-pixel bitmap cannot produce a clean 32-pixel version, but the reverse works every time.
Keep the authored file separate from the exported one — the flattening step below is lossy and irreversible, so name the source logo.src.svg.
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Two things must be true of the file before it goes anywhere. Text has to be converted to paths, because the renderer on the other end does not have your font and will substitute or drop it. And it must not reference anything external — no <image> href, no remote stylesheet, no script — because sanitizers strip those and leave you with a blank square.
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logo.svg is now the distributable: paths only, no font dependency, minified. Rasterize from it, and keep editing logo.src.svg.
What each registrar wants#
| Target | Format | Dimensions | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trust Wallet | PNG, committed as logo.png |
256 × 256 recommended, 512 × 512 at most | 100 kB |
| Etherscan family | SVG or PNG, as a download link | 32 × 32 SVG, 64 × 64 PNG | — |
| Blockscout | SVG, or PNG, at a public URL | 48 × 48 PNG | — |
| CoinGecko | PNG, JPG or WebP, uploaded | 200 × 200 | — |
| CoinMarketCap | PNG with transparency, at a URL | 200 × 200, square or rejected | — |
| GeckoTerminal | PNG or JPG, uploaded | square, 30 px or more | 2 MB |
| Dexscreener | PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF, uploaded | square, 100 px wide or more | 4.5 MB |
| DEXTools | image, uploaded | 200 × 200 | 200 kB |
| DefiLlama | any, supplied with the pull request | square; 400 × 400 is the common size | — |
MetaMask contract-metadata |
SVG, PNG or JPG, committed | square | — |
Token list logoURI |
SVG or PNG at a URL | 64 × 64 suggested by the schema | — |
wallet_watchAsset image |
PNG, JPG, SVG, or data URI | ≤ 512 × 512 | 256 kB |
Four of them also want a wide header image: CoinGecko at 1360 × 430 or more, GeckoTerminal at 1280 × 430 or more, Dexscreener at 3:1 and 600 pixels wide or more, and DEXTools at exactly 600 × 200. A 1500 × 500 image at 3:1, under 2 MB, satisfies the first three, and DEXTools takes a 600 × 200 reduction of it.
Rasterizing#
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Inkscape does the same job if librsvg is not installed:
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ImageMagick is the wrong tool for this step. Given an SVG it rasterizes at the file’s intrinsic size and then resamples, so magick logo.svg -resize 256x256 produces visibly softer edges than a direct 256-pixel render. Use it for the PNG-to-PNG work below and for inspection, and let rsvg-convert or Inkscape handle the vector.
Getting under 100 kB#
A flat vector mark at 256 × 256 lands around 8 kB after lossless optimization, so the Trust Wallet ceiling only becomes a problem for photographic or heavily gradient icons.
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pngquant quantizes to an 8-bit palette. On flat artwork the result is indistinguishable; on a gradient it bands, which is one more reason not to use a gradient.
Check yourself#
Confirm dimensions, alpha channel, and byte count in one pass:
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The channels field must read srgba. If it says srgb, the alpha channel was flattened somewhere and the icon now carries a white box that will be visible on every dark background.
Look at the icon the size it will actually be shown, blown up with nearest-neighbour so the pixels are visible:
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Composite it against both grounds:
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And apply the circular crop the wallets apply:
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Naming and placement#
Registrars key on the EIP-55 checksummed address, mixed case, rather than the lowercase form most tools print, and some of them compare it as a string:
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The registrars split on how they take the file. CoinGecko, GeckoTerminal, Dexscreener and DEXTools upload it from your machine, and Trust Wallet and MetaMask’s repository take it as a committed file; Etherscan, Blockscout, CoinMarketCap and the token list logoURI all want a URL. Assume the link route: the files need a permanent home before you start submitting. A path on your own domain works and can be repointed later; IPFS or Arweave works and cannot. Whichever you choose, the URL is going to be copied into half a dozen third-party databases that will never re-fetch it, so treat it as immutable from the first submission onward.