In November 2015, an Ethereum developer named Fabian Vogelsteller published a proposal called EIP-20. It described a simple standard for creating tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Any developer could follow this standard to create a token that would be compatible with wallets, exchanges, and other infrastructure. The proposal was accepted and renamed ERC-20 (“Ethereum Request for Comment 20”). It would become the most important technical standard in crypto history.
Before ERC-20, creating a cryptocurrency required building an entirely new blockchain. You needed miners, nodes, wallets, and exchanges to support your coin. The barrier to entry was high, which is why there were only a few hundred cryptocurrencies in 2015. After ERC-20, creating a token became trivial. A developer could write a few dozen lines of Solidity code, deploy it to Ethereum, and they had a fully functional token. No blockchain needed. No miners needed. No infrastructure needed.
This simplicity unleashed a tsunami of tokens. In 2016, a few dozen ERC-20 tokens existed. By 2017, there were thousands. By 2018, tens of thousands. Every ICO in the 2017 bubble used ERC-20. Every DeFi protocol used ERC-20 for its governance token. Every meme coin, every celebrity endorsement, every marketing gimmick could be turned into an ERC-20 token. The standard had democratized token creation — for better and for worse.
ERC-20’s simplicity was its genius. The standard defined just a few functions: transfer, balanceOf, totalSupply, approve, allowance. That was enough to make tokens interoperable. An ERC-20 token from one project could be traded on a decentralized exchange, stored in a wallet, lent on a lending platform, and used in a game — all using the same interface. The standard created a universal language for tokens on Ethereum.
The impact of ERC-20 extended far beyond Ethereum. Other blockchains copied the pattern. BEP-20 on Binance Smart Chain. TRC-20 on Tron. SPL on Solana. The idea that tokens should be interoperable standards, not custom implementations, became a core principle of the entire crypto industry. ERC-20 is sometimes criticized today for being too simple — it doesn’t handle edge cases well, and better standards like ERC-777 and ERC-1155 have been proposed. But its simplicity was exactly what made it successful. Sometimes, the most impactful innovations are the ones that make hard things easy.
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