Bilingual on-chain love letter from Li Jie to Cai Shichao (lex to Sally), April 2018. Chinese pledge etched to the chain plus English summary.
Historical Significance
An early bilingual on-chain text inscription. While the 2018 lake survey identified roughly 30 narrative-text contracts (obituaries, love letters, religious dedications), this is the only example with a Mandarin pledge of permanence wrapped around an English summary, and the only one whose author wrote in both their native language and a translation for a non-Mandarin-reading audience. It predates the 2021 to 2022 wave of on-chain text NFT projects (Loot, Autoglyphs as outliers) by three to four years. The Mandarin phrase 'etched onto this blockchain, until the heavens grow old' anchors the cultural framing of blockchain permanence in a way that aligns the technology with classical Chinese poetic conventions about durability and devotion.
Context
Deployed 28 April 2018, three months after the late-2017 bull market peak and during the long 2018 grind down. Solidity was at v0.4.x and contract storage was effectively free at the time, making short text inscriptions practically zero-cost. EIP-170 (24,576 byte contract size limit) had been in effect for over a year, so any text under around 24kB could be inscribed by deploying a single contract.
Key Facts
Description
A contract whose only on-chain purpose is to carry a love letter. The runtime returns a single bilingual string from getter selector 0x0bd3daa4. The text is a Mandarin pledge followed by an English summary by the same author.
Chinese (original): 蔡世超，我爱你！自今起，我把对你的爱与祝福，镜刻到这区块链上，直到天荒地老，让世界一起见证。爱你的李捷。
English (author's own translation): 'Sally, I love you! From now on, I put my love and best bless to you on the chain, let whole world witness our loves, yours, lex'.
Recipient is 蔡世超 (Cai Shichao, English name Sally). Author is 李捷 (Li Jie, English name lex). Deployed 28 April 2018 at block 5,519,530 by 0x2af93e9435d6e88f270edf6bacaa333df2aa0155. No ETH balance, no other functions, no economics. The Mandarin half of the text is the longer and more elaborate half: the literal translation is closer to 'My love and blessings for you, etched onto this blockchain, until the heavens grow old and the earth grows ancient, let the whole world bear witness together.' Loaded as a single Solidity string constant whose ABI return packs offset + length + UTF-8 bytes; both halves are stored as a single string returned in one call.
Source Verified
The full message text (both Mandarin and English halves) is recoverable as printable UTF-8 in the contract's runtime bytecode immediately preceding the trailing CBOR metadata. Confirmed by direct decode of eth_getCode and via eth_call to the single getter at selector 0x0bd3daa4. No source code was published by the deployer; the runtime is a pure constant-return Solidity contract.
Heuristic Analysis
The following characteristics were detected through bytecode analysis and may not be accurate.
Byzantium Era
First Metropolis hard fork. Added zk-SNARK precompiles, REVERT opcode, and staticcall.