The Anatomy of an ERC-20 Token and Avoiding Its Dangers From Will Warren 0x Matcha

Thu, Oct 2, 2025, 12:00 AM

While most ERC20 tokens follow community best practices and behave in a predictable manner, it is increasingly common for tokens to deviate from the norm and behave in unpredictable ways. This allows ERC20 tokens to be adapted for interesting new use cases, but also creates challenges that impact smart contract developers and end users alike. Tokens have gotten more and more complex. While the Ethereum ecosystem started out with a handful of ERC-20 tokens, in the past few years we’ve seen millions of tokens emerge, with increasingly complex behaviors: buy/sell tax, mintable, transfer pausable, whitelist and blacklist, anti-whale features... No wonder users fall into honeypots, buy a terrible token by mistake or get caught into a scam. As builders, we have the opportunity and responsibility to address this issue. Complexity causes confusion, new attack vectors, lost funds, and causes the entire industry earning a low-trust reputation. Let’s change that. At Matcha, we’re on the journey to make this information transparent and accessible. In this talk, we’ll share insights, examples, designs, user feedback and overall how we’re thinking of addressing this meaty and spikey issue.