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Unicorns(๐Ÿฆ„)

Token
Part of The Avsa Collection
0xa8c94f66f0c9...5c03b5493511
FrontierContract #8,375Source VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed February 11, 2016 (10 years ago)Block 988,909

A Democracy DAO governance contract deployed by Ethereum Foundation UX Lead Alex Van de Sande (avsa) on February 11, 2016, implementing the tutorial contract fr

Frontier EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

Deployed by Alex Van de Sande, Ethereum Foundation UX Lead and ENS co-founder, as part of a test deployment of the official Democracy DAO tutorial. Represents an early on-chain governance experiment by a core Ethereum Foundation member, and connects governance infrastructure to one of Ethereum's earliest NFT projects (Unicorns).

Context

Deployed in the Ethereum Homestead period, February 2016. The Ethereum Foundation had published the Democracy DAO tutorial in December 2015, part of a blog series on building practical Ethereum applications. avsa authored those posts and deployed these contracts in the same session as the Unicorns NFT contract.

Token Information
Token Name
Unicorns
Symbol
๐Ÿฆ„
Decimals
0
Key Facts
Deployment Block
988,909
Deployment Date
Feb 11, 2016, 06:07 PM
Code Size
2.5 KB
Gas at Deploy
616,456

Description

This Congress contract was deployed at block 988909 on February 11, 2016, by Alex Van de Sande (ENS: alex.vandesande.eth), the UX Lead and designer at the Ethereum Foundation from 2014 to 2018 and co-founder of ENS (Ethereum Name Service). It implements the Democracy DAO pattern described in the Ethereum Foundation blog post series published in December 2015: "Ethereum in practice part 2: how to build a better democracy in under a 100 lines of code."

The contract manages membership, proposals, and voting. Key parameters include minimumQuorum (the minimum number of member votes required for a proposal to pass), debatingPeriodInMinutes (the minimum time a proposal must remain open for discussion), and majorityMargin (the margin by which yes-votes must exceed no-votes). Members can add proposals specifying a recipient address, an ETH amount, and a description. After the debating period, any member can tally the votes and execute the proposal if it passes.

This specific deployment includes custom extensions beyond the base Democracy tutorial: references to a unicornAddress and priceOfAUnicornInFinney, linking the governance contract to avsa's Unicorns project, which was deployed in the same session at block 988949. The deployment represents avsa testing governance infrastructure for his early NFT project on mainnet.

The broader Democracy DAO tutorial was influential in shaping early thinking about on-chain governance. The pattern introduced ideas that would later be refined in more sophisticated DAO frameworks, including The DAO (2016) and Compound Governance (2020). avsa's direct deployment of this pattern in February 2016, just two months after authoring the blog post, makes this a primary artifact of that early governance research.

Source Verified

Etherscan verified
Heuristic Analysis

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

Detected Type: Token
Has ERC-20-like patterns

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes2,574
Unique Opcodes182
Jump Instructions121
Storage Operations75

External Links