greeter

The Greeter is the official "Hello World" tutorial contract from the Ethereum Frontier documentation. It was published in the go-ethereum wiki under "Contract Tutorial" and was recommended as the first contract a developer should deploy on the live Ethereum network. The contract demonstrates inheritance in Solidity through two components: a base contract named mortal that provides a kill() self-destruct function, and a greeter contract that extends mortal and adds a greet() function returning a configurable string message.

This specific deployment was made by Anthony Eufemio (ENS: thanateros.eth), the Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Digix Global, a project building gold-backed tokens on Ethereum. Eufemio deployed it at block 49392 on August 7, 2015, approximately nine days after the genesis block. His choice to deploy the canonical tutorial contract on mainnet reflects the exploratory and experimental culture of the Frontier period, during which even experienced developers tested their understanding of the platform with simple reference contracts before building more complex systems.

The Greeter remained dormant for years until a self-destruct (kill()) transaction was submitted in 2023, over eight years after its original deployment. The mortal pattern it demonstrates became a well-known early Solidity idiom, though it was later reconsidered as the Ethereum community developed more sophisticated access control patterns.

Historical context: August 7, 2015 fell during the Ethereum Frontier release phase, the first public version of the Ethereum mainnet. The go-ethereum wiki Contract Tutorial was one of the few documentation resources available to developers at the time. Deploying the Greeter was the recommended first step in the tutorial. Eufemio was one of the early developers to complete this exercise on the live network, in the same week that the first financial and naming contracts began appearing on-chain.