An 86-byte contract that returns your ether: any plain transfer is refunded to the sender while its single storage slot stays zero.
Historical Significance
A guard clause around a refund, written against a flag that no code can ever set. It reads as the skeleton of a pausable escrow with the pause half unimplemented, which is what a great deal of 2015 contract code was: the shape of an idea deployed to see whether the shape worked at all.
Context
Deployed 2015-08-27 by 0x4aa9950530c116b0bf5fcaf9c1f0e295dcc98d0c. One instance of this runtime is known. Source recovered by exact runtime bytecode match and verified on Sourcify.
Key Facts
Description
There are no named functions. The fallback reads storage slot 0 and, when it equals zero, calls msg.sender.send(msg.value), returning the ether in the same transaction. Nothing in the contract ever writes that slot, so the guard is permanently satisfied and the refund path always runs. The send return value is not checked, and there is no owner or withdrawal function.
Source Verified
Heuristic Analysis
The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.
Frontier Era
The initial release of Ethereum. A bare-bones implementation for technical users.
Bytecode Overview
Verified Source Available
Source verified through compiler archaeology and exact bytecode matching.
View Verification ProofShow source code (Solidity)
// Submitted by EthereumHistory (ethereumhistory.com)
contract Refund {
uint locked;
function() {
if (locked == 0) {
msg.sender.send(msg.value);
}
}
}External Links
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