ERC
Ethereum Request for Comment. A numbered standard that defines how a specific type of smart contract should behave. Common examples are ERC-20 (fungible tokens), ERC-721 (NFTs), and ERC-4626 (tokenised vaults).
Also known as: Ethereum Request for Comment, ERC standard
ERCs are the reason Ethereum became a functional ecosystem rather than a collection of incompatible islands. The ERC process borrows from the internet’s RFC (Request for Comment) tradition: anyone can draft a proposal, the community reviews it, and if the design is good enough it becomes a de facto standard that every application follows. ERC-20, the fungible token standard, was drafted in 2015 and is the reason every token on Ethereum has the same basic interface, which is why every wallet, exchange, and DeFi protocol can handle every token without custom integration work.
The big ERCs cover the major primitives. ERC-20 defines fungible tokens (USDC, LINK, UNI, every DeFi token). ERC-721 defines NFTs where each token is unique (CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, most art NFTs). ERC-1155 is a multi-token standard that handles both fungible and non-fungible tokens in a single contract, useful for game items. ERC-4626 standardises yield-bearing vaults so DeFi aggregators can route through them uniformly. ERC-1155 and ERC-4626 came later precisely because the community saw that building everything on ERC-20 was leaving value on the table.
The DeAI-relevant ERCs are newer and still being adopted. ERC-8004 defines a registry standard for AI agents so they can discover each other on-chain. ERC-8183 defines a payment protocol for agents so they can pay each other for services without manual human intervention. ERC-7683 handles cross-chain intents in the same way. Whether these catch on depends on whether agent-based applications actually need standardised discovery and payment layers, which is an open question today but the infrastructure is there if the use cases materialise.
Non-Ethereum chains usually implement equivalents rather than the exact ERC standards. SPL tokens on Solana do what ERC-20 does. CW20 contracts on Cosmos chains follow a similar pattern. The concepts are portable even if the specific names aren’t. When a project says it “supports ERC-20 and SPL,” that means the same token can exist in parallel on Ethereum and Solana using each chain’s equivalent standard, usually connected by a bridge. The ERC family is the template, not the universal standard.