Etheria

Etheria v1.1 was deployed at block 459,708 on October 29, 2015 (21:11:55 UTC), by the same pseudonymous developer responsible for the earlier Etheria versions. The contract governed a 33×33 hexagonal world stored entirely in Ethereum state, where players could own, name, farm, and trade tiles. Compared to v1.0, the v1.1 deployment added the setLocked() function and related locking logic, which the developer subsequently used to permanently lock the contract against self-destruction (locking transaction: 0x97341f4...), ensuring the game world could not be deleted even by its creator.

Tiles in v1.1 were purchased for 1 ETH each, with an in-contract offer system enabling secondary market transfers between players. Ownership was tracked directly in Solidity state mappings rather than via a transferable token standard—ERC-721 would not be proposed until 2018. Despite this, each tile functioned as a unique, non-fungible on-chain asset, making Etheria a direct ancestor of the NFT concept. The source code, compiled with Solidity v0.1.6, is preserved and verified on Etherscan.

In the original 2015 description on etheria.world, the developer wrote: "Etheria cannot be taken down. Not by the government, not by its owner-players, not even by the developer (me). Etheria will exist as long as Ethereum does." This philosophy—full decentralization of a virtual world—was unprecedented at the time. The locking of v1.1 made good on that promise, permanently rendering the contract immutable even to the deployer.

Etheria v1.1 sold out all 33×33 = 1,089 tiles, generating significant early interest from the Ethereum community. The contract has since become a historical artifact, with its tiles traded on secondary markets. The developer later acknowledged in a 2021 site update that Etheria was "the first true NFT project in history, by more than a year."