u/gorewndis

Three months after mainnet launched, Vitalik deployed an advertising auction system to Ethereum. Eight ad slots, four auction mechanisms (one-phase winner-pays, cumulative, sealed-bid first-price, sealed-bid second-price), all managed by a factory contract called adStorer from ethereum/dapp-bin.

I matched the deployed bytecode to source through compiler archaeology. Exact match, 8,752 bytes, solc v0.1.1. Then I decoded every transaction across all 8 child auction contracts.

The only bidder was Vitalik himself. Two wallets (his old deployer and what’s now vitalik.eth), 229 transactions, 0.064 ETH in bids. The winning “advertisements” were two image URLs: me.jpg (a photo of himself) and heiko.jpg (a photo of Heiko Hees, who was building pyethereum). Both are 404 today.

Some details:
Slot 5 is a second-price sealed-bid auction. vitalik.eth bid 0.0005 ETH, his old wallet bid 0.0003 ETH. Second-price rules made vitalik.eth pay the runner-up’s price. The first Vickrey auction on Ethereum selected a photo of a pyethereum developer over its own creator.

Gas cost more than the bids. Vitalik burned ~1 ETH on gas (at 60 gwei, hard-coded in his deploy script) to move 0.064 ETH through the auction mechanics. At October 2015 prices, the whole experiment cost about $2.

Slot 1 was a stress test. 159 transactions, with Vitalik rebidding the same 0.0001 ETH increment 19 times in a row to validate cumulative bidding.
Three of the four all-pay auction variants got zero bids. He abandoned the one he tried before revealing. Even Vitalik didn’t trust his own all-pay math.

The sealed-bid auctions had a frontend bug where bid hashes were passed as ASCII hex instead of raw bytes, making commitments readable in calldata. Didn’t matter since the only participant wrote the code.

0.029 ETH (~$70 today, $0.03 in 2015) is still locked in the child contracts from unrevealed sealed bids.
This was deployed three weeks before DevCon 1, on a network with maybe a few hundred users. A mechanism design experiment that nobody participated in except its creator, preserved on-chain for ten years.

I checked the Wayback Machine for the ad images. The closest capture of vitalik.ca/files/ is from June 2016. Neither photo was archived.

Full documentation with verified source, decoded bids, and all 8 slots mapped: https://ethereumhistory.com/contract/0xaf0334bf30c401b7e3afafbac1dbcdc712be8b9e

This is part of the EthereumHistory project where we’re documenting and verifying the earliest Ethereum contracts. If you want to help, the project is open.

A weird technical side effect of crypto maturing: very old Ethereum assets do not always fit cleanly into the assumptions modern infra makes.

Tokens from the 2015-2016 era were created before a lot of ERC-20 conventions hardened. When people want to trade them now, they often end up building wrappers or extra tooling around them.

That creates something like compatibility debt:

• old contracts stay historically important and socially valuable
• modern routers, wallets, and analytics expect cleaner interfaces
• instead of replacing the original asset, the market adds layers around it

So the history of the chain starts leaking into product design.

You can see it with frontier-era tokens like MistCoin and Unicorn Meat getting wrapped into assets that play more nicely with current DEX infrastructure.

I think this is an underrated part of crypto's long-term design problem. If blockchains really preserve assets for decades, then every generation of tooling inherits weird edge cases from the last one.

Curious what people think: does this become a serious architecture problem over time, or is wrapping and middleware enough to smooth it over?

I have been watching wrapped versions of very early Ethereum tokens like WMC and w🍖 trade again, and it raises an interesting market question.

These assets are not winning because of new roadmap hype or massive utility promises. Their pitch is mostly historical:

• they come from the 2015-2016 frontier era
• they are tied to recognizable early Ethereum figures and experiments
• they survived long enough to become tradeable artifacts instead of dead contracts

So what is the real source of value here?

A few possibilities:

• pure scarcity and collector psychology
• social status from owning a piece of Ethereum history
• speculative trading on thin float and narrative spikes
• genuine belief that onchain historical artifacts will become a serious asset class

My guess is it is some mix of all four, but I am curious how this sub thinks about it.

If you buy something like this, are you buying a microcap, a collectible, or basically a museum piece with a market attached?

One thing I did not appreciate until digging through early Ethereum tokens: some of them break assumptions that modern DEX infrastructure takes for granted.

Example: MistCoin and Unicorn Meat come from the 2015-2016 era before ERC-20 conventions fully settled. To make them easier to trade on current rails, people wrapped them into ERC-20 compatible assets like WMC and w🍖.

Why the wrapper matters technically:

• early token contracts can have unusual decimals behavior or non-standard interfaces
• modern DEX routers, analytics tools, and wallets expect predictable ERC-20 semantics
• wrappers let an old asset plug into Uniswap-style liquidity, price charts, and portfolio tooling without changing the original contract

So the wrapper is not just branding. It is a compatibility layer between historical Ethereum artifacts and present-day market infrastructure.

That feels like a broader pattern we will see more often as crypto matures: old contracts surviving long enough that new middleware gets built around them instead of replacing them.

Curious if people see wrappers like these as technical preservation, financial packaging, or both.

Most crypto market discussions focus on new launches, but two early Ethereum-era tokens are still around and actively trading:

• Wrapped MistCoin (WMC): wraps MistCoin, one of the earliest Ethereum tokens from November 2015, tied to Fabian Vogelsteller and the pre-ERC-20 period.
• Unicorn Meat (w🍖): wraps Unicorn Meat, an April Fools 2016 Ethereum token by Alex Van de Sande with a one-way ETH grinder mechanic.

Current CoinGecko snapshot:

• WMC: about $1.91, roughly $998K market cap, about $10.4K 24h volume.
• w🍖: about $0.0105, roughly $1.05M market cap, about $72.6K 24h volume.

What I find interesting is not just the price. These are examples of Ethereum market history that survived long enough to become liquid artifacts. The tokens predate most of today’s crypto categories, yet wrappers, Uniswap liquidity, and collector narratives have given them a second life.

Curious how people here think about old-chain assets like this. Are they mostly collectibles, thin-liquidity speculation, or a legitimate historical niche like early NFTs?

I wanted to share something interesting that happened recently. Etherscan added an info note to the Unicorn Meat token page that reads:

>"This token was created by Avsa of the Ethereum Foundation. Read more about it in this post."

The link goes to a tweet from the official @ethereum account from April 1, 2016 announcing "the Unicorn Meat Grinder Smart Contract and Bribable DAO" by @avsa.

For those who don't know the backstory: Alex Van de Sande (avsa) was one of Ethereum's earliest core team members. He built the Mist Browser, the Ethereum Wallet, and co-created ENS. In early 2016 he deployed a set of contracts as part of the ethereum.org tutorials, including the Unicorns token and the Unicorn Meat Grinder, a DAO that let you convert Unicorns into Unicorn Meat through on-chain governance.

The contracts were deployed from his same wallet that deployed the Foundation Tip Jar, which Alex made on behalf of the Foundation to raise money and donors received Unicorn tokens. So the provenance chain is: same deployer address, multiple Etherscan-labeled EF contracts, and now an official Etherscan note confirming the connection.

What makes this historically interesting:

• The Meat Grinder was one of the first DAOs on Ethereum, predating The DAO by months. It used a proposal and voting system where token holders could vote on actions like grinding Unicorns into Meat.
• It introduced one of the first token upgrade patterns. The Unicorn-to-Meat conversion was essentially a token migration mechanism, something that became standard practice years later.
• The contracts were based on the ethereum.org tutorials that avsa wrote to teach developers how to build on Ethereum. These tutorials were how an entire generation of Solidity developers learned the language.

We've been working on documenting and verifying the source code of these contracts on EthereumHistory, including cracking the bytecode of contracts that were never verified on Etherscan. We recently launched a Collections feature that groups all contracts by their deployer, starting with avsa's 60 contracts and Vitalik's 66 contracts.

We also recently cracked and verified the Meat Grinder's source code on Etherscan. The source had been sitting in avsa's public GitHub gist for 10 years but was never formally verified on-chain. The challenge was figuring out the exact compiler settings: these contracts predate Solidity 0.4, so there's no metadata hash in the bytecode to help identify the version. We had to work through early solc releases until we found that solc 0.2.1 with default optimization produced an exact byte-for-byte match against the on-chain runtime bytecode. Once confirmed, we submitted it to both Sourcify and Etherscan, so anyone can now read the original Solidity source directly on Etherscan and verify it themselves.

It's a small thing, but these early contracts are historical artifacts. Having their source verified on-chain means the code is permanently readable and auditable, not just sitting in a gist that could disappear.

If anyone is interested in Ethereum's early contract history, the provenance page has the full chain of evidence laid out, and EthereumHistory is an open platform where anyone can help document contracts.