During the process of defining the token standard in Ethereum, effort was made to ensure that the standard conforms as much as possible to all use cases. A particularly important distinction is the one between tokens used by people and tokens that probably won’t see a UI in front of it. A human token system can be something like a currency or shares. A machine token could be something like a smart meter generating kilowatt hours and automatically creating sellable tokens for sending energy back into the grid. In the IOT space, these tokens might in the future be generated by the thousands and might only exist for short periods of time. However, having a standard API is still useful in order to create programmable tokenized infrastructure.



Since the more immediate use cases for tokens center around use by people, the Ethereum Foundation and Mist team have forged ahead with their own standard on what a human-readable token looks like.



We have thus moved along with these recommendations by adding 3 optional features to the default Standard Token: