EIP Ethereum Improvement Proposals

An EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) is a formal specification for a change to Ethereum—the protocol, contract interface standards, or infrastructure. EIPs are written by researchers, developers, and community members. The process is intentionally open and decentralized: anyone can submit an EIP, the community discusses it, core developers implement if consensus is reached, and node operators vote through consensus. ERCs (Ethereum Request for Comments) are a subset of EIPs focused on application-level standards. ERC-20 (fungible token standard) and ERC-721 (NFT standard) are the most famous; they define how tokens behave so wallets and exchanges understand them uniformly.