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Unicorn Meat Grinder Association

DAO
Part of The Avsa Collection
0xc7e9ddd5358e...73149beeaa32
HomesteadContract #13KExact Bytecode MatchEdit this contract
Deployed March 25, 2016 (10 years ago)Block 1,211,176

Token-weighted DAO from Alex Van de Sande's 2016 'Meat Grinder' demo: Unicorn holders submit/vote on proposals (vote weight = balance × sqrt(value + gas × gaspr

Homestead EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

The historical importance of the Unicorn Meat Grinder Association DAO lies in the fact that it was created by a leading Ethereum Foundation developer during a period when decentralized governance had not yet been formalized or standardized. Rather than being a retrospective experiment or an external application built atop mature tooling, the DAO reflects how Ethereum’s own core contributors were actively testing governance models, incentive structures, and contract-driven coordination on mainnet itself. It stands as one of the earliest practical demonstrations of token mutation, showing that digital assets on Ethereum could be consumed, transformed, or evolved through smart contracts. As deployed bytecode, the DAO remains a permanent artifact of early Ethereum thinking, preserving both its technical assumptions and its design philosophy.

Context

In 2016, Ethereum was less than a year old, and the ecosystem lacked established patterns for DAOs, token standards, or governance frameworks. Developers were exploring these ideas directly through experimental contracts, often blending technical inquiry with humor to lower barriers to participation and understanding. The original Unicorn token, distributed informally by the Ethereum Foundation as a gesture of appreciation to donors, served as the substrate for this exploration. The Unicorn Meat Grinder Association extended that token into a governed, autonomous system, testing how community-held assets could be collectively managed and transformed without centralized oversight. Over time, activity within the DAO diminished, as was common for many early Ethereum experiments, but its contracts remain intact. Today, the project is best understood not as a joke or a product, but as a historically grounded example of how Ethereum’s early leaders explored the boundaries of decentralized systems through live, on-chain experimentation.

Key Facts
Deployment Block
1,211,176
Deployment Date
Mar 25, 2016, 02:55 AM
Code Size
4.5 KB
Gas at Deploy
1,445,663
Transactions by Year
201615
20177
202519

Description

The Unicorn Meat Grinder Association, deployed March 24, 2016 by Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) of the Ethereum Foundation. The first self-identified quadratic voting DAO on Ethereum. Accepts Unicorn tokens via grindUnicorns() and dispenses Unicorn Meat tokens.

Source Verified

SolidityExact bytecode match(4,640 bytes)
Compiler: v0.2.1+

Byte-for-byte match: 4,640-byte runtime and 5,040-byte creation prefix (trailing 192 bytes are ABI-encoded constructor args). Compiled with soljson v0.2.1+commit.91a6b35f, optimizer ON. Reproducible via cartoonitunes/meatgrindersassociation-verification. Optimizer: ON (200 runs)

Heuristic Analysis

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

Detected Type: DAO
Has ERC-20-like patterns

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes4,640
Unique Opcodes214
Jump Instructions196
Storage Operations141

External Links