1.17 ERCs & EIPs

EIPs

EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal: proposals put forward by researchers, developers and/or community members in the Ethereum ecosystem to make changes to different aspects of the Ethereum protocol.

There's a very well defined specific process for EIP from the time somebody proposes one to the way it is discussed, debated, voted upon and finally made it into a standard or a specification.

Depending on the different layers of the Ethereum protocol, the proposal targetting these could be either addressing the core aspects of the protocol, the networking aspects, the interface or some of the token standards.

ERCs

ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comments. It has (sort of) become the used term for token standards. For example you have probably heard about ERC20 token standard or ERC721 token standard and so on... These are being created as part of the EIP process.

There are also some meta and informational EIPs that don't address the protocol as such, but that address some of the governance aspects of this whole ecosystem, the process and so on... They also address some of the informational aspects of how these standards and specifications are written and distributed within the community.