Pandora is novel because crypto denizens can trade it on both a decentralized exchange or an NFT marketplace. Rolled out on Feb. 2, the token has a market cap of over $245 million.

Pandora’s box has swung open in the crypto ecosystem. 

Pandora is a newly launched token that adheres to “ERC-404,” a new and experimental token standard on Ethereum. The cryptocurrency was rolled out on Feb. 2 and on Friday at 6 p.m. ET it was trading at $25,152, making its market cap stand at over $245 million, according to CoinGecko. 

Per crypto analytics trading platform DexTools, Pandora has more than $38 million in liquidity. 

Pandora “reminds me of the quantum state of Schrödinger’s Cat, you know, it’s neither alive or dead or it could be alive or dead… So basically it [Pandora] could be either a non-fungible token which is what we know as NFTs, ERC-721, but also it could be a fungible token,” said Journey Li, a product marketing manager at blockchain analytics firm Nansen in a YouTube video.

Pandora, through its adherence to ERC-404, combines two token standards, ERC-20 and ERC-721. ERC-20 introduces a standard for tokens to make sure each one is the same as others, making them fungible, while ERC-721 is a different standard that makes a token uniquely different from others. Therefore ERC-721 cryptocurrencies are called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

On the project’s GitHub page, Pandora’s developers wrote that “While these two standards [ERC-20 and ERC-721] are not designed to be mixed, this implementation [ERC-404] strives to do so in as robust a manner as possible while minimizing tradeoffs.” 

Pandora is novel, because “you can buy this ERC-404 on a DEX (decentralized exchange) or on an NFT marketplace. This wasn’t possible before,” Nansen’s Li said. 

Pandora announced late Friday that blockchain security firm PeckShield completed a smart contract audit report for the ERC-404 token. The security firm said that they did not discover any “critical level vulnerabilities.” 

Unlike ERC-20 and ERC–721, ERC-404 is an “unofficial” token standard on Ethereum, because it has not undergone the Ethereum Improvement Proposal process that is used to suggest, discuss and implement changes to the Ethereum blockchain.