GavCoin: Gavin Wood's 2016 token is still mineable on Ethereum mainnet

Before ERC-20 existed, Gavin Wood wrote a token contract called GavCoin and pushed it to the official ethereum/dapp-bin repository. The source code uses sendCoin and coinBalanceOf instead of transfer and balanceOf - it predates any token standard.

In July 2015, Vitalik referenced GavCoin five times in his "On Abstraction" blog post as the canonical example for explaining how tokens work on Ethereum. It was already part of the shared vocabulary of early Ethereum developers before mainnet had been live for a week.

The contract was deployed to mainnet on April 26, 2016 (block 1,408,600) from a wallet traceable to EthDev and the Genesis block. The name "GavCoin" is hardcoded in the constructor bytecode. A day later, Gavin tweeted "Aww. Me and my key" - his only tweet that month.

The mining mechanism is interesting. Anyone can call mine() to mint GAV proportional to the number of blocks elapsed since the last mint. It's essentially a faucet with a time-weighted distribution - earlier miners get more since block intervals accumulate. The validator of the block also receives an equal amount. There's no supply cap.

We rebuilt the original dapp as a static site and put it on IPFS, accessible through ENS at gavcoin.eth.limo. You can connect a wallet and actually mine, send, or check balances. The history page documents the full provenance trail with primary sources.

The contract: 0xb4abc1bfc403a7b82c777420c81269858a4b8aa4

Original source: ethereum/dapp-bin/coin