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PixelMap

NFT
0x015a06a43335...c109882a15ab
Tangerine WhistleContract #26KSource VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed November 17, 2016 (9 years ago)Block 2,641,527

One of the earliest NFT projects on Ethereum — a decentralized pixel art billboard deployed November 17, 2016 by Ken Erwin, inspired by The Million Dollar Homep

Tangerine Whistle EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

PixelMap is one of the earliest surviving NFT projects on Ethereum, deployed over a year before the ERC-721 standard was proposed (January 2018). It demonstrates on-chain ownership and on-chain image storage using only basic Solidity data structures, predating the conventions that later defined the NFT ecosystem. Its 2021 rediscovery helped establish the historical NFT collecting category and demonstrated that valuable digital artifacts could lay dormant on-chain for years.

Context

In November 2016, Ethereum was roughly 16 months old. ETH traded around $10. The DAO hack and subsequent hard fork had occurred just months earlier (July 2016). Smart contract development was still experimental, with developers learning Solidity through personal projects. The concept of non-fungible tokens had no formal standard — ERC-20 had only recently been proposed (November 2015) and ERC-721 would not arrive until January 2018. PixelMap was built in this frontier period when developers were exploring what on-chain ownership could mean beyond fungible tokens.

Key Facts
Deployment Block
2,641,527
Deployment Date
Nov 17, 2016, 04:29 AM
Code Size
1.9 KB
Gas at Deploy
589,588
Transactions by Year
201639
201785
202115,248
20221,176
202331
20247
202528

Description

PixelMap is a decentralized pixel art billboard on the Ethereum blockchain, heavily inspired by Alex Tew's The Million Dollar Homepage (2005). Created by developer Ken Erwin as a side project to sharpen his Solidity skills, PixelMap went live on November 17, 2016 — years before the ERC-721 NFT standard would be proposed.

The contract manages a grid of 3,969 purchasable 16x16 pixel tiles (plus one hidden tile), totaling 1,016,064 pixels on a 1,296 x 784 grid. Each tile was initially priced at 2 ETH (approximately $20 at the time of deployment). Unlike The Million Dollar Homepage, where only the site creator could update tiles, PixelMap's smart contract gives tile owners full control: they can update the tile's image, change the URL it points to, or set a sale price — all without any central authority.

Notably, PixelMap stores image data directly on-chain within each tile's struct, making it one of the earliest projects to put visual data permanently on the Ethereum blockchain. The original contract uses a simple mapping-based ownership model that predates ERC-721 by over a year.

The project was largely forgotten after its 2016 launch, with only about 20-30 tiles purchased in its first years. A contemporaneous Gitter chat room from December 2016 shows early community discussion about tile pricing. The project was rediscovered in August 2021 by NFT historian Adam McBride, who recognized its historical significance. The rediscovery story was later featured on This American Life (Episode 769: The Reluctant Explorer), bringing mainstream attention to the archaeology of early Ethereum contracts.

PixelMap is widely recognized as the second-oldest NFT project on Ethereum, after Etheria (October 2015), and is among a small handful of pre-ERC-721 NFT artifacts that survive from Ethereum's earliest era.

Source Verified

Etherscan verified
Heuristic Analysis

The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.

Detected Type: NFT

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes1,932
Unique Opcodes135
Jump Instructions85
Storage Operations44

External Links