ERC-20
What does ERC-20 mean? It is the acronym for the technical standard of Ethereum smart contracts. The acronym stands for “Ethereum Request for Comments”, which originally indicated the name of the official protocol for proposing improvements to the network. The number “20”, on the other hand, indicates the series of the proposal, made by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015.
ERC-20 became the standard for creating fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The guidelines require the smart contract to fulfil 6 mandatory functions, plus 3 optional ones, namely:
-TotalSupply: To manage the maximum number of tokens that can be dispensed
-BalanceOf: To determine how many tokens have an address
-Transfer: To send the token from the provider to the user who gets it
-TransferFrom: To manage the exchange of tokens between users
-Approve: To confirm the transfer to the user, checking that the number of tokens has not reached the supply limit.
-Allowance: To check that the user has a minimum amount to make the transfer.
The optional functions are “name”, “symbol” and “decimal”. These enrich the properties of the token, to facilitate its operation.
An example of an ERC-20 token is YNG. The Young Platform token complies with the technical standard introduced by Ethereum and is managed on the Ethereum blockchain.
