Skip to main content
Developers
Omnichain Contracts
ZRC-20 Tokens

ZRC-20

ZRC-20 is a token standard integrated into ZetaChain's omnichain smart contract platform. With ZRC-20, developers can build dApps that orchestrate native assets on any connected chain. This makes building Omnichain DeFi protocols and dApps such as Omnichain DEXs, Omnichain Lending, Omnichain Portfolio Management, and anything else that involves fungible tokens on multiple chains from a single place extremely simple — as if they were all on a single chain.

zeta-evm

Supported Assets

I list of currently supported assets is stored on-chain:

Loading...

New assets can be added or removed by broadcasting a transaction with a corresponding message of the fungible module on ZetaChain.

Introduction

At a high-level, ZRC-20 tokens are an extension of the standard ERC-20 tokens found in the Ethereum ecosystem, ZRC-20 tokens have the added ability to manage assets on all ZetaChain-connected chains. Any fungible token, including Bitcoin, Dogecoin, ERC-20-equivalents on other chains, gas assets on other chains, and so on, may be represented on ZetaChain as a ZRC-20 and orchestrated as if it were any other fungible token (like an ERC-20).

Interface

ZRC-20 is based on ERC-20, with three additional functions and some associated events for integration with Cross-Chain Transactions (CCTXs) in ZetaChain.

IZRC20.sol
loading...

Comparing ZRC-20 to ERC-20, there are additional external functions to deposit and withdraw, and additional events for each of them. This makes ZRC-20 completely compatible with any applications built for ERC-20s, but with an extremely simple interface to also function in an omnichain way.

deposit

When a user sends/deposits assets to the ZetaChain TSS address (Testnet, Mainnet) on a connected chain, deposit is called by zetacore and made available to the address that deposited. If there is data on the TX message, the system contract DepositAndCall is called, forwarding that data in a call to onCrossChainCall on the target zEVM contract. The deposit and DepositAndCall functions are only callable by the CCTX module (zetacore module) address.

This is a snippet of what the system contract looks like, where DepositAndCall may be called by zetacore after receiving a deposit into a TSS address (Testnet, Mainnet) managed by the ZetaChain network.

contract SystemContract is SystemContractErrors {
address public constant FUNGIBLE_MODULE_ADDRESS = 0x735b14BB79463307AAcBED86DAf3322B1e6226aB;
// ...
function depositAndCall(Context calldata context, address zrc20, uint256 amount, address target, bytes calldata message) external {
if (msg.sender != FUNGIBLE_MODULE_ADDRESS) revert CallerIsNotFungibleModule();
if (target == FUNGIBLE_MODULE_ADDRESS || target == address(this)) revert InvalidTarget();
IZRC20(zrc20).deposit(target, amount);
zContract(target).onCrossChainCall(context, zrc20, amount, message);
}

A contract that implements this interface may be called by a ZRC-20 deposit call.

zContract.sol
loading...

How to deposit and call zEVM contracts from a smart contract chain

This is an example calling from an Ethereum chain to send a transaction to the ZetaChain's testnet TSS address in order to deposit.

import { task } from "hardhat/config";
import { HardhatRuntimeEnvironment } from "hardhat/types";
import { parseEther } from "@ethersproject/units";
import { getAddress } from "@zetachain/protocol-contracts";

const main = async (args: any, hre: HardhatRuntimeEnvironment) => {
const [signer] = await hre.ethers.getSigners();

const to = getAddress("tss", hre.network.name as any);
const value = parseEther(args.amount);

const tx = await signer.sendTransaction({ to, value });

console.log(`Transaction hash: ${tx.hash}`);
};

task("send", "Send tokens to a TSS address", main).addParam(
"amount",
"Amount to send to the recipient"
);

If you instead wanted to do a DepositAndCall, you can do a similar pattern but include data in the deposit call. This example demonstrates calling a swap contract that exists on the zEVM.

TestDepositAndCall.js
import { task } from "hardhat/config";
import { HardhatRuntimeEnvironment } from "hardhat/types";
import { parseEther } from "@ethersproject/units";
import { getAddress } from "@zetachain/protocol-contracts";
import { BigNumber } from "@ethersproject/bignumber";
import { prepareData } from "@zetachain/toolkit/helpers";

const main = async (args: any, hre: HardhatRuntimeEnvironment) => {
const [signer] = await hre.ethers.getSigners();
console.log(`🔑 Using account: ${signer.address}\n`);

const destinationToken = getAddress("zrc20", args.destination);
const data = prepareData(
args.contract,
["address", "bytes32", "uint256"],
[destinationToken, args.recipient || signer.address, BigNumber.from("0")]
);
const to = getAddress("tss", hre.network.name as any);
const value = parseEther(args.amount);
const tx = await signer.sendTransaction({ data, to, value });
console.log(`Transaction hash: ${tx.hash}`);
};

task("swap", "Swap tokens", main)
.addOptionalParam("recipient", "Address of the recipient, defaults to signer")
.addParam("contract", "Address of the swap contract on ZetaChain")
.addParam("amount", "Amount to send to the recipient")
.addParam("destination", "Destination network, like 'goerli_testnet'");

Source: https://github.com/zeta-chain/example-contracts/blob/main/omnichain/swap/tasks/swap.ts

Supported assets include ZETA, native gas tokens on all connected chains including Bitcoin as well as ERC20 tokens. ERC20 tokens must be whitelisted by the ZetaChain network in order to allow zEVM to interact with them.

withdraw

The withdraw function can be called by any Externally Owned Account (EOA) or a smart contract. This function is like transfer(), except that the amount is burned, and leaves a Withdrawal() event. This event will trigger a CCTX in zetacore module, which the zetaclient will pick up and process the outbound tx. In this example, it uses an existing Uniswap deployment with a pool for 2 given tokens. When onCrossChainCall is called, it performs a swap to a target ZRC-20 token and withdraws it to an address on a native chain.

Check out the Swap tutorial to see how to deposit tokens (like tMATIC), swap them to another token (like gETH) using the internal liquidity pools on ZetaChain, and withdraw them to their native chain (like Goerli).

Building on ZRC-20

With ZRC-20, developers have the power to build seamless, omnichain applications while also leveraging the entire EVM ecosystem to-date and plethora of contracts/protocols to build on top of. To start building with ZRC-20, check out some examples in the tutorials section.