The ERC-20 leaderboard has a Unicode lookalike problem
· 4 min read
The per-contract ERC-20 transfer leaderboard looks sane for about three rows. USDT is first, USDC is second, WETH is third, and then individual tokens whose names look like USDT, USDC, and ETH start showing up. Aggregated as a family, those lookalikes belong above WETH.
From June 17 through June 23 UTC, 19 Unicode lookalike contracts in the top-50 ERC-20 event sources emitted 4,858,242 unique Transfer logs. Real USDC emitted 4,929,166. The lookalikes got almost the same event count from 47,703 transactions, while USDC needed 1,596,999 transactions.