Now that we know a little more about tokens, we are going to delve into another very important concept in Ethereum development which is ERCs, Ethereum Request for Comments.The ERCs, Ethereum Request for Comments, are proposals generated by the community or the Ethereum developers themselves in order to promote this blockchain platform, generating interoperability in the ecosystem and facilitating the integration of these by applications that make use of tokens.
In turn, ERCs are nothing more than a type of EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) at the application level, which to become standards must first go through consultation and review phases until they are approved.Next we are going to discuss the main ERCs token standards that exist today: ERC-20 TokenCurrently, although its functionality is basic, it is the most widely used and most relevant standard due to its great interoperability in the environment.Provide the methods of token transfer (transfer), approval or authorization of use of your tokens to another Ethereum address (profit), authorized token transfer from another Ethereum address (transferFrom), current balance query (balanceOf) and query of the amount of tokens possible to use on behalf of another Ethereum address (allowance).
To save the balances, a 'mapping' type variable is used, which relates an Ethereum address with its corresponding token balance: (mapping (Address => uint256) balances)In the 'Etherscan' explorer you can check the number of existing tokens deployed in the main Ethereum network, as well as their value and more information.
At the time of writing this article there were 125,699 ERC20 tokens.
It can represent anything from ownership of a work of art to a loan or a traffic ticket.
In addition, it provides new methods such as the secure transfer of token (safeTransferFrom), previously verifying that the address that carries out the transfer is that of the owner of the token; property (ownerOf), to query the address to which the token belongs; or taking ownership of the token (takeOwnership), from an authorized address.