EarlyChainLetter100ETH

This chain-letter contract was deployed at block 60143 on August 9, 2015, accepting 100 ETH per participant entry. It follows the same queue-based redistribution pattern as companion contracts deployed days earlier: participants send 100 ETH, are added to an investor array, and receive ETH redistributed from later participants. The getNumInvestors() function tracks the current participant count.

The deployer (0xa14Cf6cEC1c6aAe4b608458F6e14692863A937Aa) was active on Ethereum from block 50406 and created several contracts during the Frontier period. Notably, the deployer also participated in their own contract: the first external deposit of 100 ETH at block 60375 came from a different address, and the deployer themselves deposited 100 ETH at block 60393, placing themselves within the investor queue.

This contract is part of a family of three chain-letter investment contracts that appeared on Ethereum between August 7-9, 2015: a 0.1-ETH variant at 0xbaa54d6e90c3f4d7ebec11bd180134c7ed8ebb52 (block 49936), a 10-ETH variant at 0xa327075af2a223a1c83a36ada1126afe7430f955 (block 49931), and this 100-ETH variant. The three contracts appeared from different deployer addresses, suggesting either coordination among early Ethereum users or independent parallel development of the same concept at different stake levels.

The contract received 29 transactions including deposits of 100 ETH from multiple distinct addresses during 2015 and 2016. In 2024, the getNumInvestors() function was called by blockchain researchers, showing sustained archival interest. Academic research on early Ethereum financial contracts documented this class of scheme extensively: Bartoletti et al. (2019) catalogued 191 such contracts active from August 2015 to May 2017.