TIL the first ERC-20 token was deployed on November 3, 2015 — written in Solidity 0.1.6, months before the standard even had a name

I've been going down a rabbit hole on early Ethereum contract archaeology and found something I thought was worth sharing.

MistCoin was deployed on November 3, 2015 — just a few months after Ethereum's mainnet launch. It implements what we'd now recognize as the ERC-20 interface (transfer, balanceOf, totalSupply, approve/transferFrom), but ERC-20 as a formal standard didn't exist until Fabian Vogelsteller's EIP in late 2015, and wasn't widely adopted until 2017.

A few things that stood out to me looking at the contract:

• **Solidity 0.1.6.** The syntax looks almost alien compared to modern Solidity. No `pragma`, no `view`/`pure`, no SafeMath. It's like looking at a fossil record of the language.
• **Fixed supply of 1,000,000 tokens.** No mint function, no owner privileges, no upgradability. The entire supply was assigned in the constructor and that was it. Immutable from day one.
• **The contract structure itself became the blueprint.** If you compare MistCoin's layout to the ERC-20 standard that was formalized later, the resemblance is striking. The pattern of mapping balances, emitting Transfer events, and the approve/transferFrom flow — it's all there.

What I find interesting isn't the token itself, but what it tells us about how Ethereum's developer culture evolved. In 2015, people were hand-rolling token contracts from scratch with no standards, no templates, no OpenZeppelin. The fact that multiple developers independently converged on nearly identical patterns is what eventually made ERC-20 possible as a standard — it codified what was already emerging organically.

The contract is still on-chain, obviously. Blockchain archaeology is one of those things that reminds you everything on Ethereum is permanent. The earliest experiments are still sitting there, readable and verifiable.

More details on the history: [mistcoineth.com](https://mistcoineth.com)

Has anyone else found interesting pre-standard contracts from 2015? I'd love to know what other early experiments are still sitting on mainnet.