Etherboard (2015): A 1000×1000 pixel canvas on the Ethereum blockchain, 4 months after mainnet launch

In November 2015, just four months after Ethereum's mainnet went live, someone deployed a 1000×1000 pixel canvas where you could buy, color, and trade individual pixels on-chain.

How it worked:

• 1 million pixels, each with an owner, color, and price
• Minimum pixel price: 5 finney (~$0.005 at the time)
• To take someone's pixel, you had to outbid them by 110%
• Previous owner got paid automatically (minus a 1% fee)
• You could paint individual pixels or batch-update whole blocks
• Colors encoded as RGBA: alpha * 127 + red * 65536 + green * 256 + blue

The contract used a clever compact owner ID system. Instead of storing a full 20-byte address per pixel, it mapped each address to a uint16 ID (max 65,535 unique owners). This saved massive gas on the 2 million storage slots needed for the grid.

It was basically Reddit's r/place, but 2 years earlier, on a blockchain, with real money. Each pixel was a tradeable economic unit.

The creator: Alex Beregszaszi (axic.eth), who went on to become one of the core developers of the Solidity compiler itself. The source code was published on the now-defunct etherboard.io and preserved via the Wayback Machine.

209 transactions hit the contract, mostly in its first few weeks. The Frontier era was tiny – there were maybe a few hundred active users on the whole network.

You can see the verified source and bytecode proof at ethereumhistory.com/contract/0x350e0ffc780a6a75b44cc52e1ff9092870668945

EthereumHistory is a free archive. If you find this useful, you can support it at ethereumhistory.com/donate