etheria

Etheria v1.0 (contract name: etheria) was deployed at block 420,373 on October 22, 2015, by the same pseudonymous developer who created the earlier v0.9 prototype. It represented the first public release of the Etheria game following the v0.9 beta, introducing the TileChanged event—the first on-chain event emitted by the Etheria contract system. The contract governed a 33×33 hexagonal grid stored entirely in Ethereum state, in which players could purchase unowned tiles for 1 ETH, farm blocks from their tiles, stack and color blocks, and name their territory.

The v1.0 deployment was compiled with Solidity v0.1.6, one of the earliest public compiler releases. The contract structure included a Tile struct holding ownership, name, status, farming data, and an offer system for secondary market trading—an in-contract marketplace predating modern NFT platforms by years. Ownership was tracked per address rather than via a transferable token standard (ERC-721 would not exist until 2018), making tiles non-fungible assets managed directly by contract state.

Etheria v1.0 is historically significant as one of the very first deployments of a blockchain-native game with persistent, player-owned digital land. The developer later updated the etheria.world site in 2021 to note that Etheria had "ended up being the first true NFT project in history (by more than a year)." The v1.0 contract was quickly followed by v1.1 (block 459,708, October 29) and v1.2 (block 470,957, November 1), as the developer rapidly iterated on the design in the weeks after launch.