The Smileycoin, SMLY, was launched at 1 PM GMT, Friday Nov 21 2014. 

Before the launch, the coin had been "pre-mined" up towards 25 billion coins or 50% of the total of 50 billion SMLY to be mined. This was done so that the tutor-web project has access to coins to reward students who study using the tutor-web system. These students can subsequently transfer their coins to a wallet, sell their coins, transfer them to other students or hire a peer tutor.

The coin had also been pre-tested in a single class of 200 students to see whether any problems were found with the implementation of student rewards. 

A cryptocoin such as SMLY is "mined" to generate "blocks", which store information  about these transfers. The blocks are found by solving a difficult computational problem. A "miner" is given a reward for each block found.  The launch itself drew in a number of miners. A "difficulty" parameter is set and dynamically adjusted so that approximately one block is found every 3 minutes. In the first 12 hours of public mining the difficulty went up by a factor of about 1000. 

Currently the reward is 10 000 SMLY, which implies that about 12.5 billion coins will be awarded as rewards over the first 7 years, after which the rewards will be reduced by 50%. The intent is that there will be enough SMLY both for mining rewards and for student rewards, so as to last at least 7 years into the future, only reducing each part of the 50 billion by 50% in 7 years.

The success of the launch also implies that the next steps need to be:

Implementing or joining a mining "pool".  Pools are places where multiple miners can join forces in mining the SMLY. This is needed since individuals will quickly not be able to earn any coins by mining on a single computer, given the levels of difficulty observed. 

Joining a cryptocoin exchange. This is really only needed for the miners, since the students only have a handful of coins at this stage and the tutor-web project will not be selling coins.