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EF Wallet

Multisig Wallet
0xde0b295669a9...40f4cb697bae
FrontierContract #39Exact Bytecode MatchEdit this contract
Deployed August 8, 2015 (10 years ago)Block 54,092

The Ethereum Foundation's primary treasury wallet - a 4-of-7 multisig written by Gavin Wood, deployed 9 days after mainnet launch. The ancestor of the Parity mu

Frontier EraVerified Source

Historical Significance

This is the earliest institutional multisig wallet on Ethereum and one of the most historically significant contracts ever deployed. Written by Gavin Wood himself, it represents the first on-chain implementation of multi-party fund management on the network. Its codebase directly evolved into the Parity multisig wallet, making it the ancestor of both the $30M Parity hack and the $150M Parity freeze - two of the most consequential smart contract failures in blockchain history. The contract's own survival, despite sharing the same selfdestruct vulnerability, demonstrates the critical difference between standalone and library-proxy deployment patterns. Its 60 failed kill() attempts are a testament to the security of the multisig design when properly deployed.

Context

The Ethereum genesis block launched on July 30, 2015. Within 9 days, the core team deployed this treasury wallet to manage the funds raised during the 2014 ether presale (42 days, ~31,500 BTC raised). Gavin Wood had written the wallet.sol source code six months earlier, in January 2015, while Ethereum was still in development. At the time, there were no established patterns for on-chain fund management - this contract defined the template that the entire ecosystem would iterate on. The Foundation's decision to manage funds through an on-chain multisig rather than a traditional custodian set a precedent for transparency that became a defining characteristic of the Ethereum community.

Key Facts
Deployer
Ethereum Foundation(0x5abfec...6356f9)
Deployment Block
54,092
Deployment Date
Aug 8, 2015, 03:44 PM
Code Size
4.1 KB
Gas at Deploy
1,436,963
Transactions by Year
2015100
2016177
2017133
201867
2019120
2020128
2021112
2022231
20231,393
2024186
2025473
20265

Description

This contract is the first Ethereum Foundation treasury wallet and one of the earliest examples of institutional fund management implemented directly on Ethereum. Its design reflects early best practices around shared control and spending limits, preceding later standardization of multi-signature wallets.

The address became a long-standing reference point for the community, shaping early conversations about governance, accountability, and the role of foundations in decentralized ecosystems.

Deployed at block 54,092 on August 8, 2015, this is the Ethereum Foundation's first on-chain treasury. The contract was created by address 0x5abfec25f74cd88437631a7731906932776356f9 and configured as a 4-of-7 multisig with a 1,000 ETH daily spending limit.

Source Code and Authorship

The source code was written by Gavin Wood and first committed to the ethereum/dapp-bin repository on January 23, 2015, six months before Ethereum launched. The contract is composed of four inherited contracts: multiowned (multi-signature owner management), daylimit (daily spending caps), multisig (interface), and Wallet (the main contract combining all three).

The contract was never verified on Etherscan and carries no on-chain name. Its bytecode exposes 19 function selectors including execute, confirm, addOwner, removeOwner, changeOwner, changeRequirement, setDailyLimit, and notably, kill - a selfdestruct function protected by the multi-signature requirement.

The Parity Connection

This contract is the direct ancestor of the Parity multisig wallet. Gavin Wood's wallet.sol from dapp-bin evolved into the Parity wallet contracts that suffered two catastrophic incidents in 2017: the July hack ($30M stolen) and the November freeze ($150M locked permanently when the library contract was selfdestructed). The EF's original deployment survived both events because it was deployed as a standalone contract, not as a proxy pointing to a shared library.

60 Selfdestruct Attempts

Over its 10+ year history, the kill(address) function has been called 60 times by various addresses attempting to destroy the contract and claim its ETH. Every attempt failed because kill requires the onlymanyowners modifier - 4 of 7 authorized signers must approve the operation. These failed attempts are visible on-chain as transactions to the contract with method ID 0xcbf0b0c0.

Treasury Operations

The wallet has processed 3,171 transactions from 1,640 unique senders. It has been continuously active from 2015 through 2026, with the most recent transaction on March 2, 2026. Large outflows follow a pattern of 1,000 ETH daily transfers (matching the daily limit), primarily to two EOA addresses. A single 160,000 ETH transfer occurred on October 21, 2025.

The contract currently holds approximately 10,774 ETH. Owner rotation has occurred over the years - of the 7 addresses that transacted in the first week after deployment, only one remains an active owner today.

Source Verified

SolidityExact bytecode match(4,171 bytes)
Compiler: 6ff4cd6

Gavin Wood's wallet.sol from ethereum/dapp-bin, compiled with solc v0.1.1. The direct ancestor of the Parity multisig that was later hacked.

Heuristic Analysis

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

Detected Type: Multisig Wallet
Contains SELFDESTRUCT opcode

Bytecode Overview

Opcodes4,171
Unique Opcodes244
Jump Instructions264
Storage Operations154

External Links