Sep 24, 2015 proto-DAO experiment — eight months before TheDAO. One of 10 byte-identical sister contracts deployed by 0x7931c901 in a 40-minute burst.
Historical Significance
A 10-deploy DAO-mechanism iteration test from September 24, 2015 — eight months before TheDAO went live. Implements the proposals + debatingPeriod + founder + quorum-vote pattern that TheDAO eventually shipped, at the much smaller 2.3 KB scale of a single-contract test. Deployer 0x7931c901 ran 35 such experiments through Q3-Q4 2015 with no known public attribution.
Context
Deployer 0x7931c90100285910556fd3c6406942995930ad34 first appears on mainnet on August 25, 2015 (Frontier was three weeks old) and runs through December 3, 2015. Across that window the address deploys 35 contracts that cluster cleanly into three size buckets: 4 deploys at 3,764 bytes (the largest, earliest variants), 2 deploys at 3,097 bytes (a middle iteration), and 10 deploys at 2,343 bytes all in a roughly 40-minute window on September 24 between 15:00 and 15:39 UTC. The 2,343-byte cluster (this one) is the tightest and largest burst.
TheDAO went live on April 30, 2016 — eight months later — and was attacked on June 17, 2016. The hard fork that split Ethereum and Ethereum Classic followed on July 20, 2016. The mechanism this proto-DAO test implements — proposals stored in a packed array, vote(uint, int8) for +/-/0 with one-vote-per-address tracked in a uint8 bitmap, executeProposal when quorum and time conditions met, kill() restricted to founder — is the exact shape Christoph Jentzsch's later TheDAO followed at a much larger 10-12 KB scale. Whether deployer 0x7931c901 was a Slock.it precursor, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, or an independent contributor remains undetermined in public archives.
Key Facts
Description
One of 10 byte-identical sister contracts deployed by 0x7931c901 over roughly 40 minutes on September 24, 2015, eight months before TheDAO went live. All ten share the same 2,343-byte runtime (hash 1ca1b20a417f…) and represent a single proto-DAO experiment iterated across ten parallel deployments.
Shape. Storage slot 0 is debatingPeriod (the DAO-style discussion window). Slots 1–6 hold a packed proposal table — each proposal is 8 slots wide and contains recipient address, amount, vote tallies, a description string, and a small per-voter map at the end (the uint8 packed at slot 6 holds the has-voted bit per address). The dispatcher exposes:
debatingPeriod()(selector0x6837ff1e)numProposals()(selector0x4634aed5)founder()(selector0xc1f0e8d7) — returns the deployerproposals(uint256)— returns the proposal-by-index tuple (recipient, amount, voteCount, currentResult, openToVote, executed, description)kill()— selfdestructs to foundervote(uint256, int8)(selector0x5e44daf3) — cast +1 / −1 / 0 vote, requires not already votedexecuteProposal(...)— execute when quorum reached and debating period ends
Cluster context. Deployer 0x7931c90100285910556fd3c6406942995930ad34 was active Aug 25 → Dec 3, 2015 and deployed 35 contracts total — a mix of test variants in three sizes (3,764-byte, 3,097-byte, and 2,343-byte). The Sep 24 burst of ten 2,343-byte deploys (this cluster) is the most concentrated; the 4 deploys at 3,764 bytes (b56e650c…) and 2 at 3,097 bytes (e916909c…) likely represent earlier and later variants of the same iteration.
Why it matters. This deployer was iterating on DAO mechanics — proposals, quorum, voting, execution — in September 2015, eight months before Christoph Jentzsch's TheDAO went live (April 30, 2016) and a year before the post-attack hard fork debate. The founder() + proposals[] + debatingPeriod + vote(uint256,int8) + executeProposal() pattern is exactly what TheDAO eventually shipped, but here at the much smaller 2.3 KB scale of a single-contract test. Whether the deployer was a Slock.it precursor, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, or an independent contributor is undetermined; the 35-contract deployment chain spanning four months with no known public attribution makes this one of the most under-documented serial DAO experimenters in Ethereum's first year.
Other sister contracts in this cluster: 0xcbe06ca838…, 0x8d0c131a20…, 0x8ecd7a31aa…, 0xba2423f134…, 0xc602cba93e…, 0xf9fe42060a…, 0x50b260eb03…, 0xe915ffcfbc…, 0xe26755edf7… — all byte-identical to this one.
Recovery status. Bytecode-only catalog (no source recovered). The decompiled storage layout and selector signatures are documented; matching a 2015-era source from ethereum/dapp-bin or contemporary Solidity examples is a possible next step.
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.