Introducing ERC 420¹ — the dank standard
A few days ago, we released the first set of ‘Legend Series’ cards on PepeDapp, a platform for Digital Trading Cards on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s been a exciting seeing the community rally around what we’ve been working on so far. There’s a lot more goodness coming down the pipeline.
We’ve recently been turning our eyes to the future, namely figuring out how PepeDapp might integrate with wallets and exchanges. The question we get the most from prospective partners is ‘Why isn’t PepeDapp ERC 721?’
We’ve put a lot of thought into our decision not to be ERC 721, and we’d like to share that thinking.
The case for ERC 721
It’s valuable to review what ERC 721 is and why lots of people in the crypto-collectibles space are talking about it.
ERC 721 is an interface for Ethereum smart contracts proposed by the CryptoKitties team to standardize the idea of a ‘non-fungible token’ (NFT). An NFT is a good or asset that is completely unique relative to other assets (non-fungible) and whose ownership can be bought and sold. The ERC 721 interface is a set of methods that any contract can implement that represents this behavior. Each unique asset has a ‘tokenId’ that identifies it across the methods of the standard interface.
Why adhere to a single standard? Simple: to ease integrations. A number of wallets and exchanges have popped up that allow a buyer to view many Ethereum crypto-collectibles on the same platform. Some examples:
For the developers of these platforms, interfacing with every single crypto-collectible becomes painful if they don’t all just have the same interface. Adhering to ERC 721 makes it easier for these projects because they only have to write code that interacts with ERC 721.
Enter ERC 420, the dank standard
It seems like I’ve made the argument that we should be ERC 721, clearly not the point of this post :).
PepeDapp is not ERC 721 because we are definitively not an NFT like the other ERC 721 projects.
In PepeDapp, each card has multiple instances, identical with one another but different from other cards. So, each card is fungible with cards of the same type. This is a really important detail that makes PepeDapp what it is. We believe that collectible cards, like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon cards, are not well represented by ERC 721.
To explore why, let’s see what would have been different if we had gone with ERC 721. We could have adhered to ERC 721 by issuing a separate, non-fungible 721 token for every single instance of a card. Then, we’d have some other mechanism for defining that a set of these tokens are all the same card type.
The issue with this approach is that different tokens of the same card type are distinguishable and perhaps could have different market values. For example, say that token ID 1 and token ID 10 both corresponded to a Satoshi card. Then, users might decide that Satoshi 1 is more valuable than Satoshi 10
because it has an ‘earlier’ ID (or vice-versa). In general, different token IDs means collectors have a way to mentally distinguish between different instances of the card. We want to create a platform where every Satoshi card feels equal.
Making our own path
If we’re not ERC 721, what are we? The answer: the dankest standard on the internet — ERC 420.
It’s still early days for assets defined on the Ethereum platform and we should expect that plenty of new standards will pop up over time. We believe that collectible cards are something that many people will want to represent on Ethereum and hope to push forward a new standard that makes it easier to do so.
Stay tuned! As PepeDapp develops and we learn more about what we want from the standard, we’ll move towards defining it and proposing it as an official Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP).
And if you’d like to take a look at the code yourself, we’re entirely open source.
The PepeDapp story is just beginning, head on over to check out the pieces we’re already selling.
You can also find us on Telegram, Twitter, and (of course) Medium.
And if you want to connect on anything I’ve written about here, please get in touch!
¹ We haven’t presented our standard to the Ethereum community yet, but stay tuned!
