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Scheduler (Ethereum Alarm Clock)

Unknown
Part of The Piper Merriam Collection
0x6c8f2a135f6e...99a1a17f824b
FrontierContract #7,497Source VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed January 31, 2016 (10 years ago)Block 930,481

The Ethereum Alarm Clock Scheduler contract by Piper Merriam — one of the earliest utility smart contracts on Ethereum, enabling time-based scheduling of future

Frontier EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

The Ethereum Alarm Clock represents one of the earliest attempts to solve a fundamental limitation of smart contracts: their inability to self-execute without an external trigger. By creating a decentralized scheduling layer, Piper Merriam pioneered a pattern that would later be adopted by projects like Gelato Network and Chainlink Keepers. Deployed just five months after Ethereum mainnet launch, it demonstrated that the platform could support complex, multi-party coordination protocols beyond simple token transfers.

Context

In January 2016, Ethereum was still in its Frontier era — the initial, experimental phase of the network. The total number of contracts on mainnet was still relatively small, and most developer activity focused on basic token contracts and simple experiments. The Solidity compiler was at version 0.2.0, with many language features still being designed. Developer tooling was sparse: Truffle had just been created, and Piper Merriam himself had built Populus, one of the competing development frameworks, which he presented at Devcon1 in November 2015. The Ethereum Alarm Clock was a standout project for its ambition and technical sophistication in this nascent environment.

Key Facts
Deployer
Piper Merriam(0xd3cda9...293601)
Deployment Block
930,481
Deployment Date
Jan 31, 2016, 03:45 AM
Code Size
9.6 KB
Gas at Deploy
2,653,287
Transactions by Year
201618
20232
20241

Description

The Ethereum Alarm Clock is a smart contract protocol created by Piper Merriam (an Ethereum Foundation alumnus and creator of the Populus development framework) for scheduling Ethereum transactions to be executed at a future time. This Scheduler contract, deployed on January 31, 2016, is one of the earliest known utility contracts on Ethereum mainnet.

The protocol allows any address to set the parameters of a transaction and designate a time window during which it should be executed. Third-party executors (later called "TimeNodes") monitor the pool of scheduled transactions and execute them during the desired window, earning a bounty for their service. The system is fully agnostic to callers, meaning both human users and other smart contracts can use it.

The contract was compiled with Solidity v0.2.0 (a nightly build from January 13, 2016), reflecting the extremely early state of Ethereum tooling. It includes an embedded library called GroveLib (v0.2), authored by Piper Merriam, which provides queriable indexed ordered data structures — a sophisticated piece of on-chain infrastructure for its time.

Piper Merriam announced the v0.3.0 release of the Ethereum Alarm Clock on Reddit in October 2015, prior to this deployment. The project later evolved under the ChronoLogic Network team, with a formal v1.0.0 release and a dedicated DApp for scheduling transactions. The deployer address (0xd3CdA913deB6f67967B99D67aCDFa1712C293601) is a well-known early Ethereum developer address associated with Piper Merriam.

Source Verified

Etherscan verified
Heuristic Analysis

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

Detected Type: Unknown

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes9,853
Unique Opcodes228
Jump Instructions427
Storage Operations108

External Links