An early ERC-20-like token deployed in Ethereum's first week, built directly from the example in the official Ethereum Frontier Guide documentation.
Historical Significance
token represents one of the earliest token deployments on Ethereum mainnet — a direct implementation of the example from the official Ethereum documentation. It demonstrates that within the first 8 days of Ethereum's existence, developers were already following tutorials and deploying tokens to the live network. The contract predates the ERC-20 standard by nearly two years and illustrates the ad-hoc token patterns that existed before standardization.
Context
Ethereum mainnet launched on July 30, 2015. The Ethereum Frontier Guide — the official documentation at launch — included a "Coin contract" example to demonstrate smart contract token functionality. This deployment, made just 8 days after genesis, shows a developer following that documentation and minting tokens on the real network. The Frontier era was characterized by experimentation: developers ran geth locally, compiled Solidity manually, and deployed contracts through the command line.
Key Facts
Description
The FirstCoin contract introduced a basic but important pattern: a ledger of balances associated with addresses and the ability for those balances to be transferred between participants. The implementation closely resembles the early token interface examples published in Ethereum documentation at the time, suggesting it was derived from or directly inspired by the standard token APIs shared by the Ethereum Foundation. Although minimal and unbranded, the contract established the foundational mechanics that later became formalized in token standards.
FirstCoin is one of the earliest token contracts deployed on Ethereum mainnet, launched at block 49,853 on August 7, 2015 — just 8 days after the Ethereum genesis block. The contract was written by creator address 0x3d0768da, who deployed it alongside several other experimental contracts in Ethereum's opening days.
The source code is a near-exact copy of the "Coin contract" example from the official Ethereum Frontier Guide, the primary documentation for Ethereum at launch. The original example contract was named token; this deployment renames it to FirstCoin and hardcodes the supply at 1,000,000 rather than accepting it as a constructor parameter.
The contract implements a simple token: a mapping from addresses to balances, a sendCoin function for transfers, and a CoinTransfer event. It predates ERC-20 and has no approve, allowance, or transferFrom functions. There is no supply cap enforcement or overflow protection — both limitations typical of Solidity contracts written before best practices emerged.
A second deployment of the same contract by the same creator (0x3b4446acd9547d0183811f0e7c31b63706295f52) followed 11 blocks later at block 49,864.
Source Verified
Historian Categories
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 on Etherscan.
Show source code (Solidity)
contract token {
mapping (address => uint) public coinBalanceOf;
event CoinTransfer(address sender, address receiver, uint amount);
function token(uint supply) {
coinBalanceOf[msg.sender] = (supply || 10000);
}
function sendCoin(address receiver, uint amount) returns(bool sufficient) {
if (coinBalanceOf[msg.sender] < amount) return false;
coinBalanceOf[msg.sender] -= amount;
coinBalanceOf[receiver] += amount;
CoinTransfer(msg.sender, receiver, amount);
return true;
}
}