Ok, so you might be thinking, “What is ERC20 and why do I care?”.
ERC20 is the smart contract standard used by Ethereum. It’s become the pre-eminent standard at this point, and while the smart contract environment that Cardano will shortly offer has many advantages there are a lot of projects on Ethereum that are invested in ERC20 contracts.
So an ERC20 convertor to allow them to easily migrate might be a significant benefit for projects such as DeFi to migrate from Ethereum?
Well fortunately IOG have developed one. There’s a great blog post just published by Francisco Landino that covers the goals and details of the converter:
To expand the variety of use cases for application developers and businesses, Cardano will support the ERC20 token migration to its platform. The Alonzo hard fork and Plutus smart contracts are on the way. Once deployed, users of supported Ethereum tokens will be able to bring them over from Ethereum’s congested network and take advantage of Cardano’s transaction capacity and lower fees, while enjoying enhanced security, reduced cost, and interoperability.
https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/05/17/bringing-erc20-to-cardano/
The first migration target will be the AGI token used by SingularityNet, who have already announced plans to migrate.
The implementation of Smart Contracts is a major event in the development of Cardano, and is expected to trigger a significant influx of new projects when it goes live in Q3 2021.