Synthetic gas-bomb stress contract from December 2016, almost certainly built to benchmark node behaviour after the Spurious Dragon gas-cost repricing.
Historical Significance
Modest, but a clean snapshot of post-Spurious-Dragon Ethereum research behaviour. The September-October 2016 DoS attacks against Geth and Parity nodes (the Shanghai Devcon attacks) forced the Spurious Dragon hard fork to reprice opcodes that were cheap to call but expensive for nodes to process. In the weeks after the fork, several researchers built micro-benchmark contracts to verify the new gas pricing actually closed the DoS gap, and this contract is one of those.
Context
Deployed 22 December 2016, one month after the Spurious Dragon hard fork at block 2,675,000 on 22 November 2016. EIP-150 (gas cost adjustments) and EIP-170 (max contract code size of 24,576 bytes) had just landed. The 100-times-unrolled self-CODECOPY pattern in selector 0x6915a0b0 is recognisably a gas-pricing micro-benchmark.
Key Facts
Description
A synthetic stress-test contract from December 2016 with 47 dispatched selectors, none of which resolve against the public selector databases (4byte, openchain). The structure is uncharacteristic of a normal application: 41 of the 47 dispatched functions are empty stubs (JUMPDEST JUMPDEST JUMP) that do nothing, while one function at selector 0x6915a0b0 contains a manually-unrolled inner loop of 100 self-CODECOPY operations, each copying the entire 2,626-byte runtime into memory. Two further functions push opaque constants and emit a single log topic 0xe54f769b... as a beacon.
The deployer 0x0e95adb39a2dfe1c8f3969de4480a5d3ddfadebd called the contract with the full 3.5M gas limit and watched it consume the entire limit before reverting, consistent with someone probing how nodes priced memory-heavy operations after the Spurious Dragon hard fork (block 2,675,000, 22 November 2016) repriced memory, SLOAD, and SUICIDE-related opcodes.
The contract was flagged by the unique-selector hunt as the 'best decompilation candidate' in the 2015-2018 corpus because its selector surface looked exceptionally rich, but the richness comes from synthetic empty stubs rather than a real application. There is no meaningful Solidity source to recover.
Source Verified
No Solidity source recoverable. The contract's selector surface is synthetic (41/47 functions are empty JUMPDEST stubs). The one substantive function is a 100x unrolled CODECOPY loop. Originally listed in the unique-selector hunt as the best decompilation candidate, but reclassified after analysis as a gas-pricing micro-benchmark with no application logic.