TIL about MessageStore, a 1-function contract from August 2015 (block 53,573)

Was digging through Ethereum's earliest blocks and found this contract at 0xd2ec...3d6b, deployed in August 2015, just weeks after mainnet launch.

The entire contract is one function: set(string). It stores a single string in public storage. That is it.

What is interesting is the bytecode. It was compiled with solc v0.1.1, the earliest Solidity compiler that exists. I was able to reproduce the exact bytecode byte-for-byte using that compiler. The output matches the on-chain code perfectly.

Contracts from this era are fascinating because Solidity was still being invented. No events, no modifiers, no constructors as we know them. Just raw storage writes. The compiler output is so small you can read the opcodes manually.

The deployer (0x8674...94e2) deployed 18 contracts in the same week, all in the 52,000-55,000 block range. Looks like someone was experimenting heavily with what Solidity could do.

If anyone is interested in early Ethereum archaeology, ethereumhistory.com is documenting contracts from this period with verified source code and compiler proofs.

Edit: here is the contract page on Ethereum History.