Ethereum based non-fungible assets and ERC-721

While this site concerns itself with stablecoins, and fungible assets mainly, it’s important to understand how non-fungible tokens are represented in the broader ecosystem. This because they overlap and interact with each other.

You might be using ERC-20 based stablecoins on Ethereum to purchase NFTs. These NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are usually implemented using the ERC-721 standard. Like we wrote about on the ERC-20 page, the ERC-721 standard helped enable mass adoption of non-fungible tokens, by making it easy to manage these from blockchain wallets and other smart contracts.

If we take programmable money to the extreme, each unit could exhibit distinct properties. This would make these non-fungible, and we’d need to use the ERC-721 standard to implement these. More likely, as we start getting further legal and regulatory clarity, NFTs can in the future represent “real world assets”, like a house or intellectual property rights. This will then bring further interaction between stablecoins, NFTs, ERC-20s, and ERC-721s as one can be the underlying asset or the other.