Ethereum frontier era (2015): researchers are cracking 10-year-old contracts byte-for-byte

In the early months of Ethereum (mid-2015), developers were writing contracts in pre-release Solidity before stable versions, before ERC-20, before any of the tooling we take for granted today.

Some of those contracts have sat on-chain, unverified, for a decade. No source code. Just bytecode.

A team has been doing archaeological bytecode cracking: reconstructing the original Solidity source by finding exact compiler versions, optimizer settings, and occasionally tracking down compiler bugs that affect the output.

Recent verified matches:

• DynamicPyramid (Jan 2016): soljson v0.2.0-nightly.2016.1.20, optimizer ON. Full bytecode match.
• MeatGrindersAssociation (2016): v0.2.1, optimizer ON. Required reconstructing non-obvious inheritance structure.
• EarlyLottery (Aug 9 2015, day 3 of mainnet): first lottery contract on any blockchain. Commit-reveal scheme with 13 functions.

The pre-0.1.2 contracts are the hard ones. The compiler was still unstable, and the optimizer behavior was not documented.

Two of the tokens from this era, MistCoin (Nov 2015) and Unicorn Meat (April 2016), are still actively trading. They predate the ERC-20 standard itself.

The work is being published at ethereumhistory.com with on-chain verification proofs.