An early on-chain corporation contract by cryptonomica.net, representing company shares as ERC-20 tokens with embedded voting — deployed hours before the DAO ha...
Token Information
Key Facts
Description
Corporation is a smart contract implementing a company share registry on Ethereum, developed by cryptonomica.net and deployed at block 1,918,776 on July 20, 2016. The deployer is address 0x3b24d5ce666bf060900989e9bd4e511b7a201ada.
The contract represents corporate shares as ERC-20-compatible tokens with additional governance features including voting. Shareholders can transfer shares, approve delegates to spend shares on their behalf, and participate in on-chain voting. The source code credits the Ethereum token standard (EIP-20) and the official Ethereum DAO voting example as its primary sources.
The contract is one of the earlier attempts to encode traditional corporate structure — share ownership, transfer, and voting — directly in a smart contract on Ethereum mainnet. It was deployed using Mist wallet or browser-solidity, the developer tools available in 2016.
Notably, this contract was deployed just 1,224 blocks (approximately 5 hours) before block 1,920,000 — the Ethereum hard fork that reversed The DAO hack. The two events are not known to be connected, but both reflect the same period of intense activity around governance and on-chain organizational structures.
Heuristic Analysis
The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.
DAO Fork Era
The controversial fork to recover funds from The DAO hack.
Bytecode Overview
Verified Source Available
This contract has verified source code on Etherscan.
View Source Code