In 2021, as early Ethereum projects such as CryptoPunks and Ether Rocks saw prices skyrocket, a scramble to find other early projects ensued.
Some of the projects that were found date back to 2015, the year Ethereum itself came into existence. There is MistCoin, which was launched in November and was the first fungible token to see substantial use. Traveling further back to October, we have the well-known NFT project, Etheria.
We can go even further back to August 7, which was eight days after the launch of Ethereum. On 8:48 PM UTC of that day, the Terra Nullius contract was deployed. Terra Nullius is a cool project, but, despite a misguided attempt to reimagine it as an ownable NFT, the contract doesn’t allow items to be transferred.
However, if we travel back just a few minutes to 8:42 PM UTC, we reach the first ownable asset on Ethereum. (I am basing this off of this review by William Entriken.) In my opinion, this is a very important piece of Ethereum history that people have slept on.
The contract code is not verified, so I can’t be sure of all the details, but from poking around, I am fairly certain it is a simple token contract with functions coinBalanceOf and sendCoin. The supply is 1,000,000, and the tokens are not divisible. The original creator still owns all 1,000,000 of them, as none have been transferred. The project has no name, but I’ve taken to calling it TestCoin.
So, who is this mysterious creator? It’s an anonymous coder who uses the handle linagee. You can think of linagee as the Satoshi Nakomoto of Ethereum tokens. Not much is known about them. They were extremely excited about Ethereum when it came out. (In fact, there are fascinating archived chat logs from the earliest days of Ethereum.) Linagee was a frequent poster on Reddit up until a few years ago, and it seems that they have moved on to other projects unrelated to blockchains.
I tried to reach out to linagee with no success, so I will make a public plea here. Linagee, if you come across this article, I’m asking that you consider donating your TestCoins to the Relics DAO. This is an organization of which I am a council member. Its purpose is to spread awareness about relics on the blockchain, to prevent the propagation of misinformation, and to help people avoid being scammed. If you want TestCoin to be put to good use, not to mention receive the love and attention it deserves, this is the way to go.
Anyway, wherever you are, I hope you are continuing to find projects that excite and delight you. You are truly an unsung legend.