A new Ethereum token standard called ERC-1155, first aimed at attacking the non-fungible issues in gaming, will now be used to distinguish between real gold bars.

It joins current market favourites the ERC-20 and ERC-721.

The ERC-20 token is an Ethereum standard for fungible tokens hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. The most common use case has been for projects to launch ICOs. Benefits of this token standard include the ability to easily store and transfer into – and between – the supported wallets.

ERC-721 is the next most adopted token standard used to create a non-fungible token. Non-fungible means its can’t be replaceable by another identical item without the ability for someone to quickly notice something has happened.

What’s new?

The standard was created by the CTO on the Enjin Coin (ENJ) project, who is building a platform to play blockchain-based games. Unlike ERC-721 and ERC-20 (that require a separate contract for each token), ERC-1155 is far more efficient as it stores the ‘common’ data in a central smart contract.

From this benefit, you could look to optimise the amount of fees or ‘Ethereum gas’ required to create and transfer tokens on a given smart contract platform.

Spike in fees

In December 2017 the Ethereum network slowed down as it struggled to power the surging demand and transaction backlog from the CryptoKitties dApp. This spike in demand to power the platform (based on ERC-721 token standard) made the Ethereum gas price jump nearly 50 times from 20 to 950 wei.

A recent adopter of the standard has been the Populous World platform, whose CEO – Steve Nico Williams – announced that they “will be selling the very first of our Gold ERC-1155 pokens” on 16^th October. Using a standard like this will bring transparency in the supply and circulation of the ‘pokens’.

The first use case from Enjin was to use the token to represent in-game items such as arrows, axes and gold. It now appears the code may now be battle ready to back the real thing.