Token standards are crucial because they guide developers on creating and using tokens within a particular blockchain protocol, ensuring compatibility and interoperability among products developed using the same standard.

Token Standards

Token standards are essentially a set of agreed-upon rules that outline the design, development, behavior, and operation of cryptocurrency tokens on a specific blockchain protocol. For these standards to be effective, they must gain wide adoption. Without broad acceptance, these rules cannot be considered "standards" since standards are rules generally followed by a large community.

Why Are Token Standards Needed?

  1. Compatibility: Token standards ensure that all products built using that standard can work together seamlessly.

  2. Composability: In programming, a composable system allows developers to reuse existing components to create new products, which is also applicable to token creation.

  3. Efficiency: Token standards enhance interoperability between smart contracts. When smart contracts follow token standards, they can manage all tokens on the network effectively.

Common Token Standards

  1. ERC-20: The most popular token standard on Ethereum, allowing for the creation of fungible tokens. Examples include Shiba Inu, Tether, Uniswap, and ApeCoin.

  2. BEP-20: A token standard on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), sharing similar properties with ERC-20 due to their architectural similarities.

  3. ERC-721: This standard allows for the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum, used by many popular NFTs.

  4. ERC-777: An improved fungible token standard over ERC-20, providing enhanced privacy and addressing certain issues with ERC-20 tokens.

  5. ERC-1155: This standard helps reduce costs by allowing transactions to be grouped, and can be used for both fungible tokens like the Basic Attention Token and non-fungible tokens like CryptoPunks.

Wrapped Tokens

Tokens on different blockchains typically cannot interact with each other. Wrapped tokens address this issue by representing assets on one blockchain in a form that can be used on another. For example, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) on the Ethereum blockchain is an ERC-20 token backed 1:1 by real Bitcoin. This allows WBTC holders to use Bitcoin within the Ethereum network for trading, farming, staking, and interacting with other ERC-20 tokens.

Token standards enable the use of diverse assets within the same blockchain, solving the problem of asset incompatibility and providing flexibility for the network.