Blockchain is a new technology focused on cryptography and blockchains compatible with smart contracts (Smart Contract) have some peculiarities and one of them is the ability to "run" tokens.
Tokens are pre-programmed smart contracts within the blockchain, these contracts use their own programming language and the main one in the market is solidity, basically the entire cryptocurrency market today exists thanks to three main actors:
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Solidity
Without these three ingredients, the current cryptocurrency market would basically not exist.
Bitcoin was the one who started all this, it showed the world that it was possible to create a "ledger" to record financial transactions encrypted, completely decentralized and most importantly, secure!
A group of software engineer friends saw this fantastic innovation and decided to develop a similar blockchain but that could have interactivity outside the network's main participants. One of these friends called Gavin Wood had the brilliant idea of creating an exclusive programming language for this blockchain. .
So one of his friends called Christian Reitwiessner met with part of the group to develop this more appropriate language and thus solidity, a native Ethereum programming language, was born.
While this group was developing this programming language, another part of the group gave life to what would be the second largest blockchain in the world. Ethereum! Which has the second largest market capitalization and is responsible for the existence of the entire decentralized finance (DeFi) market, its CEO, creator, developer and founder is Vitalik Buterin.
After this brilliant creation, the new world of cryptocurrencies was born, a true innovation that allows anyone to program their own commands on the blockchain through Smart Contracts and thus the first smart contract called ERC20 was born, this contract has dozens of features including being a currency (token), with more freedom of creation and innovation than the network's own native cryptocurrency.
Other teams saw this innovation and created their own blockchains compatible with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) based on Ethereum, thus creating their own smart contracts, native to their blockchain, and thus the binance smart chain's BEP20 tokens, the network's TRC20 Tron... All these tokens from networks other than Ethereum are programmed in the solidity language and have the same ERC20 rule, but as they are from other networks they are called by the initials of their own blockchain of origin followed by the number 20.
Example: Baby Doge is a token that has the ERC20 rule but it is on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) network, so it is a BEP20 token, programmed in solidity and uses the ERC20 rule to function.
Another feature of this division of nomenclature for tokens from different networks is to facilitate transfer, see that native Ethereum tokens do not circulate on the BSC network and vice versa, i.e. Imagine the confusion it would be if you needed to send a BEP20 token and sending it to the wrong network would be a terrible thing for the user because they would lose their funds, this naming model solves this and creates greater security in currency transactions.
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Remember if! The cryptocurrency market is high risk and very volatile, so do your own research and stay safe, DYOR.
