Can ERC’s Finalize establish its orthodox status?

Recently, the discussion about ERC-6551 has been increasing. But what does ERC represent on Ethereum? Is it a source of legitimacy for the community? ZHIXIONG BlockingN wrote an article to explore this topic, arguing that “social consensus” and “fact standards” are more important than “Final state ERC”.

Hot Knowledge 1: ERC is actually an application layer standard and does not directly involve the Ethereum protocol itself. Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are clearly defined in EIP-1 as three categories: Standard EIPs, Meta EIPs, and Informational EIPs. Standard EIPs are the most common and include Core improvements, Networking improvements, Interface improvements, and Application layer standards (ERCs). Specifically, ERC-6551 defines the “Registry” smart contract and account implementation interfaces, as well as their reference implementations. For example, the most commonly used token standard in Ethereum, ERC-20, defines some basic interfaces.

Hot Knowledge 2: Specific EIP or ERC proposals have a prescribed writing format (see EIP-1 document), which is not ERCXXX but ERC-XXX. For non-ERC EIPs, the format is the same, i.e., EIP-XXX. However, this does not mean that becoming an ERC standard is the necessary path to becoming an industry standard. Compared to “Final Status ERC,” “social consensus” and “de facto standards” are more important. In fact, some “industry standards” may be rarely used, while some “practices” that have not been standardized may become de facto standards due to gradually forming social consensus.

For example, NFT is such an example. It had an application first, and then the ERC standard appeared. ERC-721 was not submitted until January 2018 and changed to Final Status in June of the same year. However, CryptoKitties, a game that was recognized as the first application using the ERC-721 standard, was launched at the end of 2017.

To summarize, both possibilities exist, but the latter may be more in line with actual circumstances: 1) Draft standards => Ecology; 2) Demand => Propose solutions => Develop standards => Ecology. Regardless of which one, the core is to solve user needs and make the solution widely accepted and used, which is the true purpose of introducing new standards.

Reference: https://crypto4.wtf/p/erc-finalize

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