Some intro
ERC-223 token standard was recently moved to "Final" status. However there is no clear path for upgrading Ethereum ecosystem to support a new standard. In fact, ERC-20 the first and the oldest standard is still the most used one despite its problems with security that caused users to lose about $200M due to impossibility of error handling with ERC-20 tokens.
What is the Token Converter?
In order to provide a clear migration path the EIP-7417 was created: a global token standard converter. The idea is quite simple: for each ERC-20 token there will be a ERC-223 "fork". Both versions will be convertable to one another through the Token Converter contract which will allow multiple standards to co-exist.
The Token Converter smart-contract was deployed on Ethereum mainnet with this transaction: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd6b01832d0c6d5f69e3fc8c9bbbd90253eb61a1bac02d834ff7e36c62aecd902
Why chose ERC-223?
ERC-223 standard makes tokens behave identical to Ether and eliminates the security problem of ERC-20 that was dealing financial damage to the users of the ecosystem for years.
ERC-223 standard also eliminates the need for approvals when a token must be deposited to a contract which allows to perform some operations within a single transaction which was not possible with ERC-20.
Find more about ERC-223 vs ERC-20 here.
What are the next steps in the development of the standards?
The next step is to set up a ERC-223 version for the most used ERC-20 tokens.
We've built a reference UI for the token converter https://dexaran.github.io/token-converter
In order to drive the adoption of the highest security standard we are building a ERC-20 & ERC-223 compatible fully decentralized exchange: https://dex223.io/