Standards& open problems

Each standard here answers one question an integrator cannot currently answer on chain. A standard ships when there is a specification, a reference implementation and a test suite that proves the claim — and until then it is listed as open, because a problem worth naming is worth naming before it is solved.

BERC-20Published

Declared behaviour for fungible tokens

A token declares every way it departs from a plain ERC-20 in one word, and an integrator establishes whether to believe it from the token's own bytecode. Five extension modules, a fixed transfer pipeline, and a shared runtime that canonical tokens clone.

Declares over ERC-20

BERC-721Open — not started

Declared behaviour for non-fungible tokens

The same question one layer over: a marketplace cannot tell whether a transfer will pay a royalty, whether an authority can revoke the token, or whether the metadata it rendered yesterday still describes the same thing. None of that is discoverable today, and the vocabulary BERC-20 uses does not transfer unchanged — a royalty is not a transfer fee, and per-token state has no analogue in a balance.

Declares over ERC-721

Open threads

Questions the work has raised and not settled. None of these is a standard, and some of them will turn out not to need one.

Rebasing: BERC-20 defines the bit and implements no module behind it. Declaring a supply that moves without a Transfer event is easy; specifying what an integrator should then do about it is not, and shipping half of that pair would be worse than shipping neither.
Cross-standard reads: An integrator holding a fungible and a non-fungible token from this framework should not need two vocabularies to ask the same question. Whether that argues for one shared word or two honest ones is unresolved.
A second runtime: The verified tier is worth exactly what the pinned runtime is worth, and a runtime cannot grow. What the migration story looks like when V2 exists — and who decides an address is canonical — is the part of the design with no answer yet.