ERC-20+, a better way to crowdfund.
ICOs have been dead for a while.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone reading this, but the ICO boom of early crypto left a host of now-defunct companies in its wake. With a 50% failure rate for ICOs to get funds — there was a really fantastic concept left behind, the ERC-20 standard.
An overview of ERC-20
Looking at the abstract for the EIP that became the ERC-20 standard its use case was very succinct.
The following standard allows for the implementation of a standard API for tokens within smart contracts. This standard provides basic functionality to transfer tokens, as well as allow tokens to be approved so they can be spent by another on-chain third party.
What this means to the layperson is a standard interface for which wallets, exchanges, and users could expect ERC-20 tokens to behave and act. This is important because ERC-20+ is not a new standard, but an extension.
Introducing ERC-20+
ERC-20+ is not a new standard, but an extension! What makes it different can be summarized in a single sentence.
ERC-20+ wraps the standard token interface in a utility that allows creators to sell tokens directly to their community with all the minting mechanisms that are available in NFT mints.
First, this isn't the first time that mintable ERC-20 tokens have been possible — OpenZeppelin even has a contract library for this!
The added benefit of ERC-20+ is that all of the minting methods and strategies from NFT mints are available by default to creators!
- Public minting
- Allowlist minting and gamification
- Charging a price per token (so you can make money)
- Being able to mint an ERC-20+ with another ERC-20! Very meta.
- Per wallet minting caps
- Per transaction minting limits
- Variable max supply available
How would I use this?
ERC-20+ is really just like selling and NFT, but this time you are selling tokens. It's quite simple to use and with Mintplex, you can get your contract on-chain and a mint website set up in minutes.
Use Case: Crowdfund your music NFT.
Imagine you are going to undertake dropping an EP or just some tracks. Making music is expensive and there's no point in dropping a music NFT that has no buyers — now you can run a limited pre-sale to bootstrap your funding.
- On Mintplex, you would launch a new ERC-20+ contract and set up a one-click minting website. All for free on Mintplex!
- You would promote your token sale on your typical social channels. Making sure there is a limited supply of the token and the price per token is set to something reasonable. Depending on how many tokens you want in circulation you can change these values on the fly.
- You sell out all your tokens! You can now go and make that music
- You launch your music NFT project (ERC-721A) with Mintplex and now you can offer your NFT for sale for x tokens as well as sell the NFTs for regular ETH.
- Now your early buyers have spent their tokens and got their value — you have successfully bootstrapped an entire music NFT using your community and awesome tech.
Since these ERC-20+ tokens are not intended to have any kind of liquidity behind them and are purely for crowdfunding/social consumption you don't have to worry about the “tokenomics” so much and can instead focus on providing value to your community with real content.
Conclusion
Mintplex is building no-code creator tools and strategies that allow you as a creator to easily and seamlessly participate in Web3 without any of the headaches of the blockchain.
ERC-20+ is just one of the ways we are changing the space for the better. Stick around and follow us on Twitter, YouTube, and our podcast where we talk about this space with guests.
