BEP-20

The name comes from "BNB Evolution Proposal," and BEP-20 is the technical specification that developers follow when writing a token's smart contract on BNB Smart Chain. It was modeled directly on Ethereum's ERC-20 standard, since BNB Smart Chain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and lets developers reuse existing Solidity code with minimal changes.

A BEP-20 contract must implement a small set of required functions, such as transferring balances, checking an account's holdings, and approving another address to spend tokens on the owner's behalf, plus optional metadata like a token name, symbol, and decimal count. This shared interface is what allows wallets, exchanges, and decentralized apps to interact with any BEP-20 token in a predictable way without custom integration for each one.

In practice, the standard underpins a large share of activity on BNB Smart Chain: stablecoins such as USDT and USDC circulate in BEP-20 form, the network's native BNB itself is wrapped as a BEP-20 token (WBNB) for use in decentralized exchanges like PancakeSwap, and many DeFi and gaming projects launch their tokens this way to take advantage of lower fees and faster confirmation times than Ethereum typically offers.

The trade-off is decentralization: BNB Smart Chain relies on a relatively small, rotating set of validators rather than Ethereum's much larger validator base, which speeds up transactions but concentrates more trust in fewer participants. Because BEP-20 addresses look identical to Ethereum addresses, sending a token to the wrong network is a common and often irreversible mistake, so confirming the correct chain before transferring is essential.