EarlyChainLetter10ETH

This contract is one of the earliest documented financial application contracts on the Ethereum mainnet, deployed at block 49931 on August 7, 2015, just eight days after Ethereum genesis. It implements a queue-based chain-letter mechanism: participants send 10 ETH, are added to an investor array, and receive ETH redistributed from later participants joining the contract. The public function getNumInvestors() allows callers to view the current participant count.

The deployer (0x881b0a4e9c55d08e31d8d3C022144d75A454211c) created three financial contracts in rapid succession during the same session: MyScheme at block 49924, this 10-ETH variant at block 49931, and a smaller 0.1-ETH variant at block 49936. All three contracts share the same redistribution architecture. The deployer also sent ETH to the MyScheme contract from these addresses, indicating these were active experiments rather than abandoned deployments.

Internal transaction records show over 1,300 ETH transfer events between this contract and participant addresses, with funds flowing from later depositors to earlier registered accounts. The contract received participant deposits throughout 2015 and 2016.

Chain-letter and pyramid-style contracts were among the first financial applications to appear on Ethereum after the Frontier launch. Academic researchers subsequently documented this class systematically. Bartoletti et al. (2019), in the paper "Dissecting Ponzi schemes on Ethereum: Identification, analysis, and impact," catalogued 191 such schemes active from August 2015 to May 2017, with the earliest examples appearing in the Frontier period alongside this contract.