What is ERC-1155? Enjin CTO: A multi-token standard for representing NFTs or currencies

ERC-1155 was formulated as early as 2018, why is it specifically mentioned? The main reason is that amidst the cooling of DeFi, there is an increasing trend of NFT topics emerging, and the founder of yearn finance, Andre Cronje, who is a prominent figure in the DeFi community, tweeted on the 27th: "ERC-1155 is cool!" This one sentence garnered nearly nine hundred likes.

Creator of ERC-1155: Witek Radomski

Witek Radomski is the Chief Technology Officer of Enjin, a blockchain gaming development and application platform on the Ethereum blockchain. He proposed the ERC-1155 standard on Github in June 2018, which became an Ethereum-approved token standard in June 2019.

ERC-1155 is also a key selling point for Enjin.

Summarizing ERC-1155

According to official documentation, it is a smart contract standard that can manage different types of tokens, such as fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, or semi-fungible tokens. Fungible tokens, like digital money, are identical and divisible; non-fungible tokens, like digital artwork, are unique and indivisible; while semi-fungible tokens, like shopping vouchers, change attributes before and after use.

Why is ERC-1155 Needed?

Current standards for fungible tokens like ERC-20 and non-fungible tokens like ERC-721 require separate smart contracts for each token type. For blockchain games, developers may need to create thousands of token types, which, following the old token standards, would consume many Ethereum resources and limit interaction due to each contract's independence.

Therefore, Enjin introduced this new token type based on its platform needs. Through ERC-1155, smart contracts can transfer multiple token types in one transaction, saving gas fees. Transactions between multiple types can be directly executed based on this standard without needing approval from different independent contracts for interaction. Within a single smart contract, interactions between fungible and non-fungible tokens can occur.

In summary, this protocol standard appears to save a lot of transaction costs and improve efficiency, coinciding with the DeFi trend. Projects such as Sandbox, Horizon Games, and War of Crypto have applied this standard.

According to Blocto co-founder Li Xuan, ERC-721 token standard is more straightforward, where each contract defines only one token format, and each token has a unique ID corresponding to its unique value. Although tokens are different, the format remains the same. To add more features, a new smart contract is required. However, non-fungible tokens under ERC-1155 are more flexible, allowing easier ownership of metadata, supply, and other characteristics, with each token having a different format.

What is ENJ Used For?

Enjin's native token ENJ is an ERC-20 standard fungible token primarily used as fuel within the Enjin ecosystem for creating tokens or using development tools.

In January 2020, the price was around 0.079, and at the time of writing, it is at 0.15, with a peak in August this year of 0.25.