CW20 Spec: Fungible Tokens

CW20 is a specification for fungible tokens based on CosmWasm. The name and design is loosely based on Ethereum's ERC20 standard, but many changes have been made. The types in here can be imported by contracts that wish to implement this spec, or by contracts that call to any standard cw20 contract.

The specification is split into multiple sections, a contract may only implement some of this functionality, but must implement the base.

Base

This handles balances and transfers. Note that all amounts are handled as Uint128 (128 bit integers with JSON string representation). Handling decimals is left to the UI and not interpreted

Messages

Transfer{recipient, amount} - Moves amount tokens from the env.sender account to the recipient account. This is designed to send to an address controlled by a private key and does not trigger any actions on the recipient if it is a contract.

Send{contract, amount, msg} - Moves amount tokens from the env.sender account to the recipient account. contract must be an address of a contract that implements the Receiver interface. The msg will be passed to the recipient contract, along with the amount.

Burn{amount} - Remove amount tokens from the balance of env.sender and reduce total_supply by the same amount.

Queries

Balance{address} - Returns the balance of the given address. Returns "0" if the address is unknown to the contract. Return type is BalanceResponse{balance}.

TokenInfo{} - Returns the token info of the contract. Return type is TokenInfoResponse{name, symbol, decimal, total_supply}.

Receiver

The counter-part to Send is Receive, which must be implemented by any contract that wishes to manage CW20 tokens. This is generally not implemented by any CW20 contract.

Receive{sender, amount, msg} - This is designed to handle Send messages. The address of the contract is stored in env.sender so it cannot be faked. The contract should ensure the sender matches the token contract it expects to handle, and not allow arbitrary addresses.

The sender is the original account requesting to move the tokens and msg is a Binary data that can be decoded into a contract-specific message. This can be empty if we have only one default action, or it may be a ReceiveMsg variant to clarify the intention. For example, if I send to a uniswap contract, I can specify which token I want to swap against using this field.

Allowances

A contract may allow actors to delegate some of their balance to other accounts. This is not as essential as with ERC20 as we use Send/Receive to send tokens to a contract, not Approve/TransferFrom. But it is still a nice use-case, and you can see how the Cosmos SDK wants to add payment allowances to native tokens. This is mainly designed to provide access to other public-key-based accounts.

There was an issue with race conditions in the original ERC20 approval spec. If you had an approval of 50 and I then want to reduce it to 20, I submit a Tx to set the allowance to 20. If you see that and immediately submit a tx using the entire 50, you then get access to the other 20. Not only did you quickly spend the 50 before I could reduce it, you get another 20 for free.

The solution discussed in the Ethereum community was an IncreaseAllowance and DecreaseAllowance operator (instead of Approve). To originally set an approval, use IncreaseAllowance, which works fine with no previous allowance. DecreaseAllowance is meant to be robust, that is if you decrease by more than the current allowance (eg. the user spent some in the middle), it will just round down to 0 and not make any underflow error.

Messages

IncreaseAllowance{spender, amount, expires} - Set or increase the allowance such that spender may access up to amount + current_allowance tokens from the env.sender account. This may optionally come with an Expiration time, which if set limits when the approval can be used (by time or height).

DecreaseAllowance{spender, amount, expires} - Decrease or clear the allowance such that spender may access up to current_allowance - amount tokens from the env.sender account. This may optionally come with an Expiration time, which if set limits when the approval can be used (by time or height). If amount >= current_allowance, this will clear the allowance (delete it).

TransferFrom{owner, recipient, amount} - This makes use of an allowance and if there was a valid, un-expired pre-approval for the env.sender, then we move amount tokens from owner to recipient and deduct it from the available allowance.

SendFrom{owner, contract, amount, msg} - SendFrom is to Send, what TransferFrom is to Transfer. This allows a pre-approved account to not just transfer the tokens, but to send them to another contract to trigger a given action. Note SendFrom will set the Receive{sender} to be the env.sender (the account that triggered the transfer) rather than the owner account (the account the money is coming from). This is an open question whether we should switch this?

BurnFrom{owner, amount} - This works like TransferFrom, but burns the tokens instead of transfering them. This will reduce the owner's balance, total_supply and the caller's allowance.

Queries

Allowance{owner, spender} - This returns the available allowance that spender can access from the owner's account, along with the expiration info. Return type is AllowanceResponse{balance, expiration}.

Mintable

This allows another contract to mint new tokens, possibly with a cap. There is only one minter specified here, if you want more complex access management, please use a multisig or other contract as the minter address and handle updating the ACL there.

Messages

Mint{recipient, amount} - If the env.sender is the allowed minter, this will create amount new tokens (updating total supply) and add them to the balance of recipient.

Queries

Minter{} - Returns who and how much can be minted. Return type is MinterResponse {minter, cap}. Cap may be unset.