5+ ERC standards every Ethereum developer should know about

(bait for ethereum lovers)

There is a long list of proposed ERC standards, but these 5 standards are ones that are most popular among the all.

ERC 20

It is the most common and well-known standard within all crypto community. 99% (if not all) issued ICO tokens on top of the Ethereum implements this standard. The key benefit we get here is that any application or other smart contracts can interact with a token in a standard manner without a need of knowing other details about the token. Therefore, we have a very pleasant way to create any ICO token and have a standard way to interact with all of them like they are all the same. For instance, crypto wallet developers can avoid custom development and integrations to add new tokens. All they need to know is the Ethereum Token address that implements the standard.

ERC 223

This proposal was introduced by a developer, who decided to solve issues with the current ERC-20 standard for tokens.

Advantages:

• Provides the possibility of avoiding accidentally lost tokens inside contracts that are not designed to work with sent tokens. However, these accidental transfers, which are uncommon already, will probably become more uncommon with ENS(Ethereum name service) in future.
• ERC-223 transfer to contracts consumes less gas than ERC-20.

Disadvantages and risks:

• ERC-223 is a proposal right now, not a standard. Therefore, there are none of the high-profile ICO tokens deployed with this standard.
• Also, it is not yet implemented in any production tokens that I found from my research.
• Exchanges might need to do some modifications in order to support such token. There are options that some of the exchanges might not be prepared for it yet.

ERC-721

The goal of this proposal is to create a non-fungible token. In ERC-20 and ERC-223 standards, we have a supply of tokens, where tokens are fungible (i.e. single unit of that token is equal to another unit). This makes it easy to trade those tokens, as all of the token supply can be treated in the same manner. However, there are various cases when you need to have unidentical tokens, which are used within the platform, and add some extra parameters and price them differently. For instance, we could have a token which represents some part of real estate object, and each token might have some different parameters added to it. Or in WePower case, tokenized electricity tokens cannot be treated the same, as each of it might represent different time frame, amount or even type of energy (solar, wind, hydro). This standard makes it easy to create marketplaces for multiple non-fungible token types.

ERC 621

ERC-621 is an extension of the ERC-20 token standard. It adds two additional functions, increaseSupplyanddecreaseSupply. This can increase and decrease the token supply in circulation. ERC-20 only allows a single token issuance event. This restricts the supply to a certain amount which can’t be changed. ERC-621 proposes that totalSupply can be modified.

ERC 827

Another extension of the ERC-20 standard is ERC-827. It allows for the transfer of tokens and allows tokens to be approved by the holder to be spent by a third party. Tokens on Ethereum can be reused by other applications, including wallets and exchanges. This could be very useful for spending a dynamic amount that is up to a third party based on some criteria both parties have agreed to. Most importantly, since it is an extension of ERC-20, it is also ERC-20 compatible.

ERC 1155

A standard interface for contracts that manage multiple token types. A single deployed contract may include any combination of fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, or other configurations (for example, semi-fungible tokens).

Other ERC standards

There are many more proposals that should make the whole standardization for Ethereum community better. It will just take time to agree and approve standards and adapt it to actually be used as it is with ERC-20.

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