One of six zombie accounts — the earliest known null deployments on Ethereum mainnet, predating the first successful contract deployment at block 48,643.
Key Facts
Description
A zombie account created during Ethereum's Frontier era by sending a contract creation transaction with empty init code (input = 0x). The transaction succeeded (status 0x1) and the address was deterministically assigned, but since no bytecode was returned by the initialisation procedure, the account's code field remains KEC() — the Keccak-256 hash of the empty string. Per the Ethereum Yellow Paper Section 7.1, this is called a zombie account: an address with no executable code whose balance, if any, is permanently locked.
This is distinct from a failed deployment (status 0x0, e.g. out-of-gas): the CREATE transaction completed successfully, but provided no init code. By the Yellow Paper's definition (Section 4.1), an account with codeHash = KEC() is a non-contract account.
These six zombie accounts predate 0x6516298e1c94769432ef6d5f450579094e8c21fa (block 48,643) — the first account with non-empty code on Ethereum mainnet, the first true contract.
Frontier Era
The initial release of Ethereum. A bare-bones implementation for technical users.