One of the earliest Ponzi schemes on Ethereum - a 102% payout contract where new deposits fund earlier investors, deployed on Frontier Day 4.
Key Facts
Description
A Ponzi scheme deployed at block 52,970 (August 8, 2015) on Ethereum Frontier. New investors send ETH via the payable fallback. Each deposit is promised a 102% return (msg.value + msg.value/50). Investors are stored in an outputs array with their payout amount. The contract automatically pays earlier investors from new deposits whenever the balance is sufficient, working through the queue sequentially. The totalOutstanding variable tracks the total amount still owed to unpaid investors. At 683 bytes, it is one of the simplest Ponzi implementations from Ethereum's first week. Same deployer (0x8674c218) as the MessageStore at rank 27.
Source Verified
near_exact_match: reconstructed source produces 677b runtime (target 683b = 99.1% match) with soljson v0.3.1 optimizer ON. All selectors confirmed via openchain.xyz. 6-byte diff likely from minor source expression variant.
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.
Bytecode Overview
Verified Source Available
This contract has verified source code.
Show source code (Solidity)
contract Ponzi {
struct Output { address addr; uint amount; }
Output[] public outputs;
uint public totalOutstanding = 0;
uint nextOutput = 0;
function() {
uint payout = msg.value + msg.value / 50;
outputs.push(Output({addr: msg.sender, amount: payout}));
totalOutstanding += payout;
while (this.balance >= outputs[nextOutput].amount) {
outputs[nextOutput].addr.send(outputs[nextOutput].amount);
totalOutstanding -= outputs[nextOutput].amount;
nextOutput++;
}
}
}