Mastering Blockchain Programming with Solidity

Overview of the ERC20 token standard

ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comment. For any technical improvements of smart contract standards, an ERC request is proposed. ERC20 is the technical standard of smart contracts for implementing a token on the Ethereum blockchain; 20 is the number of the proposal request. There are multiple steps an ERC goes through to become a standard. An ERC request is first drafted, and then goes through iterations to be updated, accepted, or finalized to become a final Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP). You can find all of the standard ERC requests that has been converted into EIPs on GitHub at https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/tree/master/EIPS.

Before moving further, let's understand the difference between ...