Maybe we don’t need a new token standard, we do need to work on security token interoperability

Hi Matthew Unger — great to hear from you!

I agree, we are unlikely to need a completely separate token standard. ERC20 has been widely used and has broad interoperability for the last 18+ months. ERC721 has rapidly become the standard for non-fungible tokens / digital collectibles. As I mentioned in the original article, ERC777 has some good upgrades but is backwards compatible with ERC20 which is what the whole industry will likely need to keep supporting as the ecosystem is so young.

The reason for pursuing a standard is to have the discussion in public and find other people to cooperate and interoperate with. If all we do is develop single, non-decentralized front ends to security tokens, we are just re-implementing the way security exchanges need to be setup per country.

We’ll be writing more about this next week, but here is our draft ERC around validating tokens for a variety of business logic needs. We want something that is broadly accepted and interoperable, and are drafting in public and holding community meetups so we can work with others around the world. The Harbor team created a repo for their R-Token, which we think is very similar to our thinking.

Will the EIP process be the best place / way to create interoperability? Not sure, but that’s what we’re starting with, and we think it’s a more “shared space” than forcing people to only come into “our” Github repo.

Totally agree that identity / KYC is an evolving area. Along with privacy of individual peoples’ details, I don’t know if it’s feasible to create decentralized KYC — so people don’t continually need to re-KYC themselves. I do want Finhaven to work with all sorts of identity providers and standards, and meet the needs of different regulatory bodies.

Hope to continue the discussion in person in Vancouver!