Last January, when the Dusk Foundation launched the ForgeAtDusk team’s public DRC20 proposal, many people’s first reaction was "Another copy of ERC20." But upon deeper examination of the design logic behind this proposal, you'll find that things are far from that simple— the emergence of DRC20 marks the DUSK ecosystem’s splendid transformation from building foundational infrastructure to thriving at the application layer. Even more interesting is that the way this standard was proposed is quite deliberate: it’s not the foundation imposing rules from the top down, but rather an innovation-driven, bottom-up approach from the developer community.

Let’s first look at the name DRC20. RC stands for "Request for Comments," a naming convention inspired by Ethereum’s EIP system. But Dusk chose DRC instead of DIP, and this is no accident—they want to establish their own standard-setting culture. As for the "20"? Of course, it’s a nod to ERC20, which is the most successful token standard in blockchain history, and almost the entire DeFi ecosystem is built upon it.

Respect ≠ Copying. The core design philosophy of DRC20 is to create a "minimal fungible token standard"—a minimal, efficient standard for interchangeable tokens. The word "minimal" is key here, reflecting a philosophy of simplicity and efficiency rather than feature bloat.

Why does Dusk need its own token standard? This stems from the technical routes of DuskDS and DuskEVM—