ERC-721 v ERC-1155

Prior to the creation of ERC-721, older NFTs like CryptoPunks were built on a derivative of ERC-20 and are today considered hybrids. ERC-721 grew to become the most popular NFT standard but in 2018 an alternative common NFT standard known as ERC-1155 was created and introduced.

ERC-1155’s thesis was simple: it aimed to merge the functionalities of both ERC-20 and ERC-721 into one NFT standard, while addressing some of the inherent flaws of ERC-721, such as higher gas consumption.

As a result, ERC-1155 is highly gas efficient, especially when doing batch transfers. For instance, it could process 10 NFTs in 1 transaction, as opposed to ERC-721 which requires 10 separate transactions to transfer 10 NFTs. However, the main trade-off is that the ownership history for ERC-1155 tokens is harder to track because of how it is programmed.

Both standards have their pros and cons and are designed for different types of assets. Notably, ERC-1155 is often seen as a semi-fungible standard because it allows the smart contract interface to represent and control both ERC-20 and ERC-721 type tokens simultaneously. Nonetheless, the core principle remains the same and allows for non-fungible assets to be tokenized and authenticated on the blockchain.