SciFi

Deployed on August 8, 2015 — just 10 days after Ethereum's Frontier launch — the SciFi contract was a lighthearted experiment in on-chain market-based voting. Users could bid ETH on their favorite science fiction movies, and the contract maintained a ranked list of the top 20 films based on total bids. All ETH sent to the contract was permanently burned: the creator deliberately included no withdrawal function, ensuring they couldn't manipulate the rankings by voting for free.

The contract was announced on r/ethereum with the tongue-in-cheek declaration: "I HEREBY DECLARE THAT THIS CONTRACT WILL FOR ALL TIME BE THE ONLY OFFICIAL LIST OF THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES FOR ALL PEOPLE ON PLANET EARTH FOR THE NEXT 1000 YEARS." The initial rankings, seeded by the creator, placed eXistenZ at #1 with 0.0045 ETH, followed by Blade Runner and Melancholia.

The Solidity source code was published directly in the Reddit post — a simple contract with a vote function that accepted a movie name (as bytes32) and a bid amount. If the movie was new, it was added to the list; otherwise the bid accumulated. Users interacted by pasting JavaScript directly into their geth console, reflecting the raw, command-line nature of early Ethereum usage before wallets like MetaMask existed.

The SciFi contract represents one of the earliest known interactive consumer dApps on Ethereum — a creative proof-of-concept that used market mechanisms (ETH staking) to solve a "real" problem (ranking movies). It also appeared in the ether.camp explorer's launch announcement as one of the featured example contracts, demonstrating that the Frontier community was already experimenting with novel use cases within days of launch.