💡 Unlike EVM chains where users must pay token transaction fees in the network's native coin (gas), eCash's eToken transactions are gasless when using the Postage Protocol—no native coin required for fees.

Tokens have existed on blockchain platforms since the early days of crypto and were always part of its programmable money ethos. They can represent real-world assets (RWAs) and anything people want to trade, from currency to stocks and property or even time. Generating value that can easily outgrow the market capitalization of the network they’re issued on. With eCash’s token ecosystem gaining momentum through its new Agora swap, it’s worth studying the history and potential of tokens and the competitive advantage of the eToken protocol on eCash.
A Brief History of Tokens
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, recognized the potential of tokenization early on and highlighted tokens as quintessential to blockchains in his introduction of Ethereum at the 2014 Miami Bitcoin conference. However, before the establishment of Ethereum’s “erc-20” token standard, token protocols had already been conceived in Bitcoin’s early days. These experiments seeded the “tokambrian explosion”, a term coined by developer Gabriel Cardona, extending to the Memecoin craze of today.
The earliest implementation of tokens on Bitcoin was “Colored Coins”. The name conveys how they work. You can take a tiny amount of Bitcoin, (referred to as dust) and color it, meaning inscribe it with token data that it carries like a mark. This Bitcoin dust becomes the carrier of a token that can represent any type of asset and value. To transfer ownership of the asset, you simply make a transaction to timestamp a new inscription.
For example, a bank wants to tokenize 1 million dollars it holds in its reserves. To do so, they “mint” 1 million USD tokens onto Bitcoin dust. Now, they send half a million USD tokens to a client. The bank is now left with half a million USD tokens inscribed on a bit of dust in their wallets, and the client has half a million inscribed on a new piece of dust in theirs.
Some more protocols were created in the early years of Bitcoin, such as Counterparty and Mastercoin (later Omni). The latter was even used by Tether to issue their first-ever USDT. However, these early token implementations struggled with programmability and usability. Technical solutions were straightforward, but core developers engineered Bitcoin away from token protocols. Full blocks (creating a high fee base layer) made dust transactions impractical, and the removal of opcodes made it harder to develop efficient protocols.
This increasingly hostile environment for tokens and functionality on Bitcoin ultimately led Vitalik to create Ethereum as its own blockchain instead of shoehorning it into BTC. This decision caused a major shift in momentum towards Ethereum, especially when it came to token use cases. Ethereum’s transaction volume exploded when BTC blocks filled up. Today ETH handles about five times the tx throughput as BTC.
Ethereum’s open approach to experimenting with tokens and decentralized applications (dApps) made it a massive success –not just for itself but for the entire crypto space. It debuted on the world stage with the ICO craze, paving the way for DeFi and diverse token use cases that have since surpassed Ethereum’s own market cap. Apart from the notable brain drain from Bitcoin onto Ethereum and other smart chain projects that make it exceptionally easy for developers to implement dApps, it also marks a significant loss for Bitcoin in other aspects.
The applications dominating the DeFi space today were originally dreamed up by optimistic Bitcoin devs. All of it was available on a scalable L1–from prediction markets that recently garnered corporate media attention with the 2024 presidential election, to stablecoin issuance that changed the face of informal remittance, savings, and payments landscape in the Global South.
Stablecoins: The Cornerstone of Tokenization

Stablecoins became essential in the crypto space by addressing the issue of price volatility and liquidity, similar to the historic role of paper money to precious metals. Pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar, stablecoins provide a reliable store of value and can be produced at a moment's notice to reflect the money joining the market. The launch of Tether (USDT) in 2014 was a major step forward in removing friction for traders, but it also silently and slowly penetrated economies around the globe by offering borderless transfer, savings, and payment use cases. Did you know that about 50% of merchants in Venezuela are happy to accept #USDT payments? This is the organic demand you’re looking for and there is much more of it worldwide.
Today, stablecoins dominate the cryptocurrency market. USDT leads with over 250 billion dollars in daily volume, the largest in crypto by far –more than Bitcoin $BTC , Ethereum $ETH , and Ripple #XRP combined. Stablecoins are not a solution that needs to be forced onto the market; rather, they are what the market has been asking for.
Despite their massive popularity and use today, it took years for most builders and enthusiasts in the crypto space to embrace stablecoins. However, people are slowly coming around to the fact that stablecoins play an important role as the medium of exchange and store of value for many people around the world who desperately need them.
Tokenized fiat and other stable assets are solving issues both in trading and for remittance or payments. The long time it took for crypto-enthusiasts to accept any kind of stablecoin is also arguably why the most centralized implementations had such an easy time establishing themselves over lackluster decentralized alternatives. These projects would have needed all the more support to get over the hurdles to be more competitive against their centralized counterparts.
Simply put, stablecoins are here to stay. Thus, there’s a good case to be made to have your network be the industry's top choice for facilitating billions of dollars of volume in stablecoins and other useful tokens. In any world where fiat exists, banking is easier and more accessible on a blockchain than at a bank. And the more programmable your network is, the less it must rely on the trusted issuance of government fiat.
Traders, retailers, individuals saving their money, and others all benefit from frictionless, low-cost, and borderless stablecoins that simply work better than legacy finance. Imagine asking a merchant to integrate eCash $XEC payments without having to sell them a whole new volatile currency on top. It would be as easy as convincing them to accept Visa, PayPal, or GooglePay. Only that it’s much cheaper, needs no contracts, and has little to no installation cost.
Once merchants onboard, they have one foot in crypto already. This helps the network effect. And if anyone wants to pay in the network’s native coin, the merchant will be more inclined to accept it. Of course, it would be trivial to enable seamless swaps during payments with instant, programmable money like eCash. This way, the merchant gets their preferred currency while the customer can pay with their preferred native coin. All these protocols already run on eCash and work in various regions around the world.
Bitcoin and other decentralized projects rejected such in-demand financial instruments. This led to a stagnant acceptance rate. Going forward, we can embrace the benefits of stablecoins and also take steps to remove any of its potentially undesirable aspects.
It’s noteworthy that serving the biggest use-case in all crypto creates inelastic demand for its native currency. This increases acceptance and reduces the currency’s volatility, solving the issue altogether. Over time, the native coin will compete better against the stablecoin. Carrying stablecoins selflessly is a way for the eCash network to shine. Especially because its token protocol is particularly suited for the task.
eTokens: An Optimized Simple Ledger Protocol

In 2018, when the eCash team was still working on Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) emerged, developed by a team of BCH developers. The efficiency of SLP tokens addressed earlier issues of token protocols on Bitcoin. Leveraging reactivated opcodes, their functionality ushered in a Colored Coins renaissance, providing flexible, secure and fast tokens. SLP was built as an auxiliary protocol outside of consensus, making it easy to iterate on while keeping eCash’s base layer lean.
At its core, SLP allows users to assign arbitrary data to transaction outputs. Just like in the colored coins example above. This inscription of transaction data on top of coins is analogous to an additional ledger on top of the main blockchain. Hence why it was called “Simple Ledger Protocol” when it was first conceived by developer James Cramer. Today, SLP is deployed on the eCash network, known as eTokens.
eTokens are written in SCRIPT language which has simpler functionality than smart chains. But it makes up for it with efficiency and reliability. And there’s one function that SLP brings along, which no smart chain has. And it just so happens to be the most crucial feature for the tokens use case: The Postage Protocol. This protocol eliminates the need for users to pay the network’s native coin to cover transaction fees. Commonly referred to as “gas”. Gasless tokens are a holy grail feature still waiting to be implemented on Ethereum and other EVM chains. There’s little hope for success due to the inherent limitations of smart chain architecture. On eCash, on the other hand, gasless tokens have been running for half a decade already.
This gasless transaction feature, developed by eCash developer Cyprian is a game-changer for token payments. It allows a user to pay any fee with the token itself, making stablecoin payments via eCash as accessible as PayPal, Venmo, or ApplePay. Or instead of paying fees per transaction, users could pay a subscription fee. Various kinds of monetization are possible while remaining non-custodial.
There are currently 3 different gasless stablecoin products deployed on eCash. They all leverage the Postage Protocol, with many users making electronic cash payments without even knowing that they’re using eCash. One is the Badger Universal Token (BUX), a regional stablecoin in Saipan, USA, facilitating payments with merchants that used to be cash-only. Another is operating in a free city-state in Morazán, Honduras, a research and development project that issues eLempira (eLPS) which has since been used for low-cost bill payments. There are also 1:1 dollar-pegged credits (CRD) you can purchase in the Pay2Stay event ticketing app. Another noteworthy prototype is the non-custodial NFC card payments solution. It combines all the great features of the eCash blockchain to recreate a Visa-like payment experience. Just swipe to pay, directly peer to peer, with a gasless stablecoin.
More general-purpose stablecoin projects and companies are looking into deploying services on eCash. These companies are driven by interest in eCash’s cost-efficiency, scalability, and above all, its unique gasless token feature.
The Competitive Edge of the eToken Protocol:
SLP tokens capitalize on the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) model, native to Bitcoin, which Satoshi Nakamoto described as "robust in its unstructured simplicity." This model contrasts with Ethereum's account-based, virtual machine model, which, despite allowing for more advanced smart contracts and being easier to program on, is less efficient, unreliable, and costly. The elegance of eTokens resides in its balanced tradeoff harboring a set of advantages that make it a superior choice especially for stablecoin payments use cases:
Cost-Effectiveness and Ease of Use: eCash is the most feasible chain in the space. That makes eTokens very inexpensive to use. They’re also very easy to create compared to tokens on other networks, lowering the barrier to entry. You can visit the cashtab.com web wallet and claim a dust amount of XEC, use that to create your token or NFT, and put it up for sale on the decentralized Agora token swap. All for free and permissionless, with a few clicks right within the Cashtab wallet.
Flexibility: The eToken protocol is not part of the consensus rules making it easy to deploy or upgrade. Being able to iterate extended, optional protocols is an underappreciated engineering strategy in crypto that only a few projects are willing or able to follow. But it’s forward-thinking, much safer, and definitely worth the extra effort. This will become apparent more so over time when features that are baked-in ossify to the extent that they cannot be upgraded without significant coordination effort to avoid disruption.
Reliable Infrastructure and Tooling: Utilizing the UTXO model, eTokens provide scalable value transfer. With the in-node Chronik indexer, they’re also natively supported, making it easy for services and developers to integrate them into their backend. Extended protocols like eTokens require robust infrastructure that works at scale. It’s also gotten much easier to build out token apps on eCash, thanks to its top-notch tooling. Something many projects can’t offer.
Interoperability: Another important ingredient is the network effect of a blockchain. Looking at which networks are currently leading the tokens and stablecoin use cases, you can deduce that low fees and fast transaction times are important but not enough. To be competitive, users need to be able to bridge their tokens to and from other networks, instead of being confined to a walled garden. While there are a few UTXO projects that have some rudimentary token capabilities, only eCash is able to trustlessly connect to the wider DeFi ecosystem leveraging its unique Avalanche consensus integration.
Gasless: Arguably the most significant competitive edge of eTokens on eCash is the ability to conduct transactions without burdening the end-user with handling two currencies to pay gas fees. In contrast to platforms like Ethereum where users must pay for gas with the native cryptocurrency (ETH) to cover transaction costs, eCash’s Postage Protocol allows users to execute eToken transactions without requiring the user to pay fees in the native coin. In fact it can be set up so that the user doesn’t have to pay fees at all.
These advantages underscore the transformative potential of tokens particularly on eCash. As the landscape continues to adapt and grow, the emphasis on user-centered features like gasless transactions will likely become pivotal in setting a new industry standard. And eCash is leading the way.
Summarizing Specs for Devs:
SLP Type
The original Simple Ledger Protocol was amazing for its time, but as more developers and users got involved, there were some considerable limitations:
More complexity for developers: Some parts of SLP weren’t easy to work with (e.g., unusual, complex encoding and token amount sizes that require special tools).Limited flexibility: Certain features like combining actions in a single transaction weren’t possible.Single mint baton: If you lost your minting rights for a token, they were gone forever.
While SLP did its job well, there was room for improvements that could take eTokens even further. So a new version of SLP was introduced.
ALP Type
The Augmented Ledger Protocol (ALP) builds on SLP’s foundation but solves its biggest challenges. It was developed by Tobias Ruck in cooperation with eCash core devs Amaury Séchet and Antony Zegers. There is also “SLP token type 2”, another alternate version of SLP, but for the purposes of this post, we will be highlighting ALP only. Here’s how it improves the eToken protocol to unlock new possibilities:
1. More Features in Fewer Transactions
ALP uses eMPP (eCash Multi-Pushdata Protocol), which allows multiple actions or protocols to fit into a single transaction.
For example, burning a token in SLP often required 2 separate transactions –one called the pre-burn and one for the actual burn, adding a lot of unneeded complexity. In ALP, you can do it in just 1 and even attach a message or additional actions.With ALP, you can also swap multiple tokens automatically in a single transaction. While this is not yet widely used, it opens the door for advanced marketplace functionality like allowing token to token swaps.
2. More Outputs, More Efficiency
By reducing the space each token amount takes (48 bits instead of SLP’s 64+ bits), ALP allows more tokens to be sent in a single transaction. For instance:
SLP could only handle up to 19 outputs per transaction.ALP allows up to 29 outputs, enabling better payout systems, like distributing token rewards to many people at once.
3. No More “Mint Baton” Bottlenecks
SLP allowed only 1 “mint baton” (a tool for creating new tokens). If you lost it, your ability to mint tokens was gone forever. ALP fixes this by allowing multiple mint batons. You can keep a backup in cold storage, ensuring your tokens stay safe and recoverable. It also removes the potential to create race conditions where multiple users try to use the same mint baton to issue new tokens.
4. More Flexibility for Creators
ALP introduces a data field and an auth public key in the token’s GENESIS transaction (the creation of the token).
The data field allows token creators to embed extra information, which is especially useful for complex protocols like NFTs or temporary event tokens.The auth public key lets token creators sign verifiable messages. Imagine token creators making official announcements or sending updates directly to users through the Cashtab wallet.
SLP vs ALP: A Quick Comparison

What Does This Mean for Users?
For users of eTokens on eCash, this upgrade means:
More functionality: ALP allows for features like combining token burns, messages, and transfers into one clean transaction.Lower costs: Fewer transactions = less network usage = lower fees.Improved tools: Apps and wallets (like Cashtab) can now offer more streamlined and innovative features for managing eTokens.
Cashtab Wallet: Supporting Both SLP and ALP
You don’t have to pick one protocol over the other. Cashtab, the go-to wallet for eCash, supports both SLP and ALP token types under the umbrella name of eTokens. This goes back to the lean strategy of integrating extension protocols outside of consensus, which allows for easy iteration without disruption while retaining backward compatibility.
SLP tokens will continue to work as they always have.ALP brings new features and efficiency for creators, developers, and users.
As ALP adoption grows, expect to see better tools, smarter tokens, and more advanced applications across the eCash ecosystem.
Build on eCash with Exceptional Tools
If you’re an artist who wants to create and list an NFT collection, you can do so in under 2 minutes directly from the cashtab.com wallet for absolutely free –no coding knowledge required.
The Bitcoin ABC team has prepared excellent infrastructure and tooling for developers to build on eCash efficiently. If you’re interested in developing a token use-case on a censorship-resistant, scalable, and super low-fee network with top-notch tools, head over to e.cash/build to get started.
You’re welcome to try out our high-capacity network with a feature set that’s got what it takes to serve the ever increasing hundreds of billions of dollars of daily volume.
Originally Published: https://e.cash/blog/etokens-a-billion-dollar-opportunity