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Etheria

nft
0xb21f8684f23d...0aaedebdb7e4
FrontierContract #3,175Source VerifiedEdit this contract
Deployed November 1, 2015 (10 years ago)Block 470,957

Part of the first decentralized virtual world on Ethereum, deployed October 31, 2015. A fully on-chain hexagonal tile world.

Frontier EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

Etheria is the first decentralized virtual world deployed on Ethereum and one of the earliest NFT-like projects on the network, predating CryptoPunks by nearly two years. It demonstrated that complex interactive applications — not just tokens or simple contracts — could run entirely on-chain using smart contracts. The tile ownership and trading system implemented a primitive non-fungible asset model before any NFT standard existed.

Context

Etheria v1.1 was deployed three months after Ethereum's genesis block, during the Frontier era when the network was still experimental and gas limits severely constrained contract complexity. Smart contract development tools were primitive — Solidity was at version 0.1.6, and developers interacted with contracts through the Geth console. The concept of virtual worlds on blockchain was unprecedented; existing virtual worlds like Second Life and Minecraft were entirely centralized.

Key Facts
Deployer
Cyrus Adkisson(0xcf684d...ad1bac)
Deployment Block
470,957
Deployment Date
Nov 1, 2015, 01:20 AM
Code Size
10.7 KB
Gas at Deploy
2,968,794
Transactions by Year
2015457
201688
201711
20211,114
202276
202356
20242
202566

Description

Etheria v1.1 is the definitive release of the first decentralized virtual world built on Ethereum. Deployed at block 470,957 on October 31, 2015 (Halloween), it replaced an earlier v1.0 release (0xe414716f017b5c1457bf98e985bccb135dff81f2, block 420,373) that contained a bug which permanently locked approximately 4 ETH.

The contract implements a 33×33 hexagonal grid of tiles, of which approximately 457 are purchasable land (the rest are water, determined by an external map contract). Players can:

  • Buy unowned land tiles for 1 ETH each
  • Farm tiles for blocks, once every ~12 hours (~2,500 Ethereum blocks)
  • Build by moving and stacking colored blocks on owned tiles
  • Name tiles or set a status message
  • Trade tiles via an on-chain offer/accept system

The entire world state — ownership, block placement, colors, names — is stored on-chain with no off-chain dependencies. The contract was written in Solidity 0.1.6, one of the earliest compiler versions used on mainnet.

Etheria was created by the pseudonymous developer "fivedogit" (Reddit/GitHub), who described the project as a response to the concern that future dominant virtual worlds would be controlled by single entities. The project's philosophy emphasized censorship resistance: "Etheria cannot be taken down. Not by the government, not by its owner-players, not even by the developer."

The project was largely dormant after its initial launch until the 2021 NFT boom, when interest in early Ethereum NFT-like projects surged. Tiles that originally sold for 1 ETH (~$1 at the time) were later traded for significant sums. The project website at etheria.world remains operational.

Source Verified

Etherscan verified

Historian Categories

NFT / CollectibleToken
Heuristic Analysis

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

Detected Type: nft
Contains SELFDESTRUCT opcode

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes10,975
Unique Opcodes218
Jump Instructions620
Storage Operations269

External Links