TIL Ethereum had quadratic voting on-chain in 2016, and the DAO that used it is still alive

Was digging through early Ethereum contracts and found something wild.

In April 2016, Alex Van de Sande (@avsa) deployed a token called Unicorn Meat as an April Fool's joke. You could "grind" Unicorn tokens (0 decimals, basically NFTs before NFTs) into Unicorn Meat (3 decimals, fungible). The grinder contract handled the conversion on-chain.

But here's the part that blew my mind: the Grinder Association DAO that governed the system used quadratic voting. In 2016. Before Gitcoin, before Vitalik's QV paper got popular, before anyone was talking about it. The voting weight scaled with the square root of tokens held, specifically to prevent whale dominance.

Piper Merriam (yes, the py-evm / web3.py Piper Merriam) ended up taking over governance of the association. The DAO is technically still functional on mainnet.

The technical design is also interesting from a token engineering perspective. The 0-decimal to 3-decimal conversion was essentially an early attempt at what we'd now call a token upgrade or migration path, but done through a grinder mechanic instead of a proxy pattern. One indivisible input, 1000 divisible units out. Irreversible by design.

It's a tiny piece of Ethereum history that somehow combined: - Quadratic voting governance (years before it was mainstream) - On-chain token transformation (not just wrapping, actual decimal conversion) - A DAO with real authority over contract parameters - All of it deployed before The DAO hack even happened

The contracts are all still on mainnet if anyone wants to poke around. Just search for UnicornGrinder on Etherscan.

Sometimes the best innovations start as jokes.