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EtherMinerals(MINERAL)

other
0xc6ce6c374d84...8afe48cf2cfc
ByzantiumExact Bytecode MatchEdit this contract
Deployed March 21, 2018 (8 years ago)Block 5,297,442

March 21, 2018 — genesis EtherMinerals NFT deploy by anonymous developer 'Elias', funded via ShapeShift, scaffolded from a Coursetro.com Solidity tutorial. 17 n

Byzantium EraVerified Source
Token Information
Token Name
EtherMinerals
Symbol
MINERAL
Key Facts
Deployment Block
5,297,442
Deployment Date
Mar 21, 2018, 09:40 PM
Code Size
5.8 KB
Gas at Deploy
1,895,786
Transactions by Year
20182

Description

EtherMinerals is the genesis deploy of a small, hand-crafted NFT collectible from March 21, 2018 — the first of three near-identical EtherMinerals contracts an anonymous developer deployed over five days in late March 2018. Seventeen named minerals on a CryptoCelebrities/CelebrityToken-derived ERC-721-draft template, each starting at 0.01 ETH, never bought by anyone in the seven years since.

THE COLLECTION (17 minerals)
Real common gems and metals — Emerald, Opal, Diamond, Bismuth, Amethyst, Gold, Fluorite, Ruby, Sapphire, Malachite, Silver. Obscure real mineralogy — Pascoite (a rare orange vanadium mineral first identified in Pasco County, Utah), Karpatite (an aromatic-hydrocarbon mineral from the Carpathian Mountains), Uvarovite (a green chromium garnet named for a Russian count). Specific provenance — Burmese Tourmaline (the Myanmar-origin gem-grade designation). Pop culture — Kryptonite (DC Comics) and "Good ol' Rock" (the Charlie Brown Halloween rock from the 1966 Peanuts special).

THE DEPLOYER
Address 0x5e97a9f58076954EF0b4943Ddd09348e188429B2, 12 lifetime transactions, all between March 19-24, 2018, no activity since. Funded once with 0.021157 ETH (~$12 at the time) from ShapeShift's no-KYC hot wallet on March 19 — a privacy-conscious crypto-to-crypto swap rather than a centralized exchange withdrawal. No ENS, no token holdings, no further on-chain trace.

Off-chain footprint (recovered via Wayback Machine): the developer ran etherminerals.com from a Windows PC under the local username "Elias" with a project folder named C:\Users\Elias\code\etherores. The frontend JavaScript copied scaffolding from the Coursetro.com Solidity tutorial series (a popular 2017-2018 YouTube course by Gary Simon), then lightly obfuscated the button handlers. The hosting account was suspended by May 5, 2018 (5 weeks after launch) and the domain dropped to HugeDomains by June. No Reddit, Bitcointalk, GitHub, Twitter, or NFT-listicle mentions of the project exist anywhere.

DEPLOY TIMELINE (UTC)
2018-03-21 21:40 — deploy #1 (this contract, the genesis), block 5,297,442
2018-03-21 21:41 — createAllTokens() mints the 17 minerals to the contract itself
2018-03-21 23:02 — openGame() opens sales
2018-03-22 00:04 — deploy #2 at 0x2efa…bb71 (later activated March 24)
2018-03-24 17:16 — deploy #3 at 0x336a…0061 (activated immediately)
2018-03-24 17:23 — deploy #2 createAllTokens + openGame (3 days after its deployment)
The 3-day gap between deploying #2 and activating it remains unexplained.

THE CONTRACT
A customized CryptoCelebrities template. The verified ERC-721 interface block includes Dieter Shirley's authorship attribution verbatim, confirming the CryptoKitties/CryptoCelebrities lineage. On top of that base the developer added: createMineral / createAllTokens (admin batch minter, not in the base template); openGame / gameOpen boolean (explicit two-phase activation — deploy, mint, then flip the switch); setLast / lastBuyer mapping (vestigial dead code — written by the constructor and an admin setter, but never read anywhere in the contract; only the constructor pre-seeds slots 1-9 of 17, oddly).

Price escalation: 90% reward to previous owner, 10% to contract. New price computed in three tiers — below 0.15 ETH price × 200/90 (2.22×), below 0.564957 ETH price × 118/90 (1.31×), above that price × 113/90 (1.256×). The literal threshold 0.564957 ETH is a non-round value the developer typed in directly; its derivation is unknown.

DIFFERENCE FROM DEPLOY #2
Deploy #1 (this contract) is 75 bytes smaller than deploy #2. The exact difference: deploy #2 added a getBalance() public CEO-only view returning the contract's ETH balance; deploy #1 has no such function. All other code (setLast, lastBuyer mapping, the entire purchase/escalation logic, the 17-mineral list) is byte-for-byte identical.

GENESIS-NESS
This is the first and only EtherMinerals contract where every one of the 17 minerals remained owned by the contract itself for the full seven years between deployment and verification (May 2026). No mineral was ever purchased. The collection sat untouched until a wrapper preserved it as on-chain pixel art.

Source Verified

SolidityExact bytecode match(5,911 bytes)
Compiler: soljson

Source recovered from deploy #2 (0x2efaf60bbd75b9430a8446bd58d12fbc3f5dbb71), which is Etherscan-verified with this same compiler. Deploy #1 differs from deploy #2 only by the omission of the getBalance() function — confirmed by bytecode-region diff against deploy #2's runtime, plus selector-presence verification across all 28 functions in the source. Adapted source compiles (solc 0.4.22-nightly.2018.3.21+commit.8fd53c1c, optimizer ON, 200 runs, byzantium EVM) to byte-for-byte identical runtime (5911 bytes) and creation (6398 bytes) bytecode, with only the 32-byte trailing CBOR metadata IPFS hash differing — expected because the EthereumHistory submission header was added to the source. Sourcify accepted as 'match / creationMatch / runtimeMatch' on the first submission. Etherscan also verified.

Heuristic Analysis

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

Detected Type: other

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes5,911
Unique Opcodes234
Jump Instructions350
Storage Operations114

External Links