One Legendary Sword or 99 Potions? ERC-721 vs ERC-1155, Explained

In any RPG inventory you'll find two kinds of things. There's the one-of-a-kind legendary sword with its own name and history. And there's the stack of 99 health potions, each identical to the next. Real games handle both without thinking. On a blockchain, they need different rules, and those rules are called token standards.

The two that matter most for games on Ethereum-style chains are ERC-721 and ERC-1155. If you've ever wondered why one game's items feel clunky and another's trade in bulk, this is often why.

A quick word on standards

An "ERC" is an Ethereum Request for Comments, a public proposal for how smart contracts should behave. Once a standard is widely adopted, wallets and marketplaces know how to display and trade any token that follows it. That's why an item from one game can show up in a general-purpose wallet or marketplace without the game building its own.

ERC-721: one token, one item

ERC-721 was finalised in 2018, after the 2017 craze for CryptoKitties, a game about collecting and breeding unique digital cats, showed there was demand for unique tokens. Each ERC-721 token has its own ID and its own owner, and nothing else in the collection is quite the same.

It's perfect for:

• unique characters, pets or heroes;
• one-of-a-kind cards, land plots or legendary gear;
• anything where the item's individual history matters.

Its weakness is volume. Each token is handled individually, so sending 50 items usually means 50 separate operations, and a game with millions of identical potions would have to mint millions of separate tokens.

ERC-1155: built for game inventories

ERC-1155 was proposed in 2018 by a team led by Witek Radomski, then chief technology officer of Enjin, a company that started out running gaming communities. It is often called the "multi-token" standard, and it was designed with game inventories in mind.

What makes it different:

• One contract, many item types. A single ERC-1155 contract can hold swords, potions, gold and badges all at once.
• Fungible and non-fungible side by side. "Potion #3" can have a balance of 99, while "Sword #7" has a supply of exactly one.
• Batch transfers. Sending 10 different items in one go is a single operation, which saves fees and time.

Why games keep switching

When Immutable merged its two blockchains in early 2026, many studios used the moment to move their item collections from ERC-721 to ERC-1155. The stated reason was liquidity: if identical items share one token type, buyers and sellers meet in a single market for "Rare Potion" instead of scattering across thousands of individual listings.

That's the practical difference for players. With ERC-721, you sell your specific item. With ERC-1155, you can sell "one of" an item type, the way you'd sell a stack on a traditional auction house.

Which one is "better"?

Neither. It depends on the item:

• Unique, collectible, story-heavy items: ERC-721 shines.
• Consumables, materials, currencies, common gear: ERC-1155 is far more efficient.

Many games use both. Others use ERC-1155 for everything, setting a supply of one for unique items.

Why it matters

Token standards sound like plumbing, and they are. But plumbing decides what a game's economy can do: whether items trade in bulk, whether fees stay low, whether a marketplace can list them at all. When you see a blockchain game describe its items, "ERC-1155" is usually a sign the developers thought about inventories, not just collectibles.

For what those tokens actually record, and don't, read Do you really own that NFT sword?, and for the fee side, our gas fees explainer.