For a year the ERC-1155 was subjected to evaluations by the developer community. Until now, the proposal has been very useful for the development of blockchain games
ERC-1155 token is available to be used by the community of Ethereum developers to be admitted as the platform’s official standard.
The information was released in June, by the Co-Founder and CTO of the decentralized gaming platform Enjin, Witek Radomski, who stated that the design of the token is complete, after having been subject to 50 reviews and 400 comments by of members of the Ethereum community for one year.
Radomski, who in June 2018, proposed the ERC-1155 jointly with his colleague Andrew Cooke, highlights among the main features of the token the fact that it offers the possibility of creating both fungible and non-fungible assets in a single smart contract. With this, it becomes an alternative to the ERC-20 and ERC-721 standards, which require a separate contract for each token (ERC-20) or a token index (ERC-721).
In this way, through this ability to create both types of assets, game developers can create hundreds or thousands of elements in a single contract without having to create a redundant code for each of them. It is a very useful proposal for the development of blockchain games, since additionally to the different characters participating in a game, there are weapons, suits, attributes and properties, which are configurable according to the different scenarios and levels of difficulty.
Some Features
The developer explains that the new Ethereum standard allows multiple tokens to be sent in a single transaction, thus making operations faster, without the need to wait for each block in individual transfers. Besides, savings in gas costs are generated and the ability to mass-produce tokens increases with minimal effort. In that sense, it is also mentioned as an advantage to avoid the duplication of codes that usually occurs with the ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards.
To exemplify this, Radomski recounts some game developers’ experience with the ERC-1155 standard. He says that Sandbox developer Ronan Sandford was able to coin more than 1,500 tokens in a block while Horizon Games developer Phillippe Castonguay used a technique that stores 16 low-resolution tokens in a single identification command (“Balance Packing”) to achieve gas savings of 80 to 90%, compared to regular transfers.
Additionally, he affirms that the standard is also useful for atomic swaps:
“Projects using ERC-1155 can also build atomic swaps with the same basic design, which allows users to exchange one type of token for another with absolute security against fraud and no intermediate parties involved,” said Witek Radomski.
This is how, with the new standard, several groups of tokens can be exchanged simultaneously in a single operation that is executed in two steps, while with the ERC-20 and ERC-721 standards, 4 steps are required.
In addition, the token ensures that the event logs issued by the smart contract provide enough data to create an accurate record of all current token balances. This is because a database can provide indexed and categorized searches for each ERC-1155. Radomski explains that this feature will become increasingly valuable as the Ethereum ecosystem continues growing.
According to the data published by Enjin in March 2019, until now more than 45 games, applications and websites have been created using ERC-1155, which is why full support for these tokens was added to the Ethereum browser, EnjinX, at the end of that month.
By Willmen Blanco
