Reviewing Token Standards | Request for Feedback

I’ve recently won a Dfinity grant to review the community’s token standards so that it’s easier for developers to know where to get started.

I’m going to start with NFT standards (because there are fewer of them) so that I can get feedback on how I did.

Here are the NFT standards I’m looking to review:

And here are the fungible standards I’m looking to review:

Can you help me? I’d like to know:

  1. What other standards should I review? Do you have a standard that I’ve missed?
  2. I’m planning to cover: getting started, features, limitations, compatibility. What else would you like to see?

You can also follow along on the Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/connormcmk/status/1505603388851036164?s=20&t=S7UoAgqAkETLArkIGPqXlw

@jzxchiang, @Mautjee, @Dali1986, @senior.joinu, @skilesare I’d love your thoughts.

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Perhaps worth considering this comment: We need a DeFi subnet - #10 by dieter.sommer

The lack of a token standard

This is critique that we definitely need to consider. We consider the way that our ICP ledger handles tokens a way well aligned with how the IC works. It’s sort of an implicit standard. However, there is indeed no explicit token standard and others have come up with standards that are closer to ERC-20. Those standards are motivated by the similarity to what people know from the EVM universe, but have their own issues.
We are currently also thinking of how to make our ledger support an ERC-20-like interface in addition.
Overall, I agree that we should consider defining an explicit token standard to avoid further fragmentation of the market and give people a clear starting point when launching their own tokens. To my knowledge, a working group for a token standard will be formed.
In a later release (Carbon), as also mentioned in a post above, we plan to enable atomic swaps to better enable DeFi.

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This may also be relevant (the problem, not necessarily the proposed solution although I think the idea to use variants has merit)

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For a project I’m currently working on I use this standard:

It is a single token standard based on the ERC-721, I am looking to rewrite it to a multi token standard much like the ERC-1155 standard on Ethereum.

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I think it might also be good to review the vanilla NNS token standard used for ICP.

Apparently, the upcoming SNS will also use that same standard.

It’s definitely a confusing landscape… I have a feeling a lot of projects have been holding off on tokenizing because they don’t know what standard they should commit to.

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Agree here, great idea to review NNS standard especially if SNS tokens adopt it

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Are any updates on your work available? @cnr

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Sure, I have a lot of private notes and I’ve done 8 or so interviews with token standard creators. I’m still in the process but here’s a checkpointed doc if you want to take a brief look or leave some comments!

Token Standards Overview

Would love comments telling me I’m wrong

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