With the ERC721 standard for Ethereum smart contracts effectively kickstarting CryptoKitties and the entire crypto collectibles genre, it’s interesting to see another standard potentially emerging.
ERC1155 allows a single smart contract to store multiple items and also allows them to be sent to multiple wallets within a single transaction.
Called ERC1155, it’s the work of Enjin CTO Witek Radomski, who also had a hand in the original adoption of ERC721, so he knows what he’s talking about.
Mix and match
In terms of what ERC1155 does, it’s a way of combining the ERC20 standard for fungible tokens (such as Ether and all the other Ethereum-based tokens), and non-fungible (or unique) tokens such as a specific CryptoKitty.
The reason for this, as Radomski points out in a Medium post, is current smart contracts only make minimal code or data changes but each one is required to be recorded on each node of the Ethereum blockchain.
This isn’t very scalable, and certainly would be a big obstacle for a game developer who wanted to deploy hundreds of thousands of in-game items. This is one of the reasons we’re seeing developers using side chains such as Loom’s so-called DAppChains, or other more scalable blockchains such as EOS.
In this way, ERC1155 allows a single smart contract to store multiple items and also allows them to be sent to multiple wallets within a single transaction, saving on gas costs.
Whether ERC1155 will become widely adopted, we’ll have to wait and see. But Enjin is already using it on its Ropsten testnet and the code has been submitted to Github, where it’s generating some interesting discussion.
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