ERC-20 is the standard for fungible tokens on EVM chains — stablecoins, governance tokens, wrapped assets, and more.
What Is an ERC-20 Token?
An ERC-20 token is a smart contract that keeps a ledger of balances and exposes a standard interface (transfer, approve, balanceOf, and so on). Because every ERC-20 contract speaks the same language, explorers, wallets, and exchanges can support thousands of tokens uniformly.
Each token has:
- Name and symbol — e.g. “Example USD” /
eUSD. - Decimals — how divisible the token is (commonly 18 or 6).
- Total supply — the number of tokens in existence.
- Contract address — the token’s unique on-chain identity.
Token Transfers
Token movements don’t appear in a transaction’s value field — they happen inside the token contract and are announced as Transfer events. OpenScan.AI decodes these events, so every transaction page lists the token transfers it triggered, and every address page shows a complete token transfer history.
Token Pages
Open a token contract in OpenScan.AI to see:
- Total supply and holder count
- Recent transfers
- The list of holders and their balances
- Contract source code (when verified)
Approvals
Before a dApp can move your tokens, you grant it an allowance via approve. Stale or unlimited approvals are a common attack vector — review them periodically and revoke what you no longer use.
Spotting Spam Tokens
Anyone can deploy a token with any name. Before trusting a token:
- Check the contract address against the project’s official channels.
- Look for verification and labels on the token page in the explorer.
- Be suspicious of unsolicited tokens sent to your wallet.
Next Steps
- NFTs — the non-fungible token standards.
- Logs & Events — how token transfers are recorded.