Etherscan officially recognized the 2016 Unicorn Meat token as an Ethereum Foundation contract, so I cracked and verified the Grinder source code

I wanted to share something interesting that happened recently. Etherscan added an info note to the Unicorn Meat token page that reads:

"This token was created by Avsa of the Ethereum Foundation. Read more about it in this post."

The link goes to a tweet from the official @ethereum account from April 1, 2016 announcing "the Unicorn Meat Grinder Smart Contract and Bribable DAO" by @avsa.

For those who don't know the backstory: Alex Van de Sande (avsa) was one of Ethereum's earliest core team members. He built the Mist Browser, the Ethereum Wallet, and co-created ENS. In early 2016 he deployed a set of contracts as part of the ethereum.org tutorials, including the Unicorns token and the Unicorn Meat Grinder, a DAO that let you convert Unicorns into Unicorn Meat through on-chain governance.

The contracts were deployed from his same wallet that deployed the Foundation Tip Jar, which Alex made on behalf of the Foundation to raise money and donors received Unicorn tokens. So the provenance chain is: same deployer address, multiple Etherscan-labeled EF contracts, and now an official Etherscan note confirming the connection.

What makes this historically interesting:

• The Meat Grinder was one of the first DAOs on Ethereum, predating The DAO by months. It used a proposal and voting system where token holders could vote on actions like grinding Unicorns into Meat.
• It introduced one of the first token upgrade patterns. The Unicorn-to-Meat conversion was essentially a token migration mechanism, something that became standard practice years later.
• The contracts were based on the ethereum.org tutorials that avsa wrote to teach developers how to build on Ethereum. These tutorials were how an entire generation of Solidity developers learned the language.

We've been working on documenting and verifying the source code of these contracts on EthereumHistory, including cracking the bytecode of contracts that were never verified on Etherscan. We recently launched a Collections feature that groups all contracts by their deployer, starting with avsa's 60 contracts and Vitalik's 66 contracts.

We also recently cracked and verified the Meat Grinder's source code on Etherscan. The source had been sitting in avsa's public GitHub gist for 10 years but was never formally verified on-chain. The challenge was figuring out the exact compiler settings: these contracts predate Solidity 0.4, so there's no metadata hash in the bytecode to help identify the version. We had to work through early solc releases until we found that solc 0.2.1 with default optimization produced an exact byte-for-byte match against the on-chain runtime bytecode. Once confirmed, we submitted it to both Sourcify and Etherscan, so anyone can now read the original Solidity source directly on Etherscan and verify it themselves.

It's a small thing, but these early contracts are historical artifacts. Having their source verified on-chain means the code is permanently readable and auditable, not just sitting in a gist that could disappear.

If anyone is interested in Ethereum's early contract history, the provenance page has the full chain of evidence laid out, and EthereumHistory is an open platform where anyone can help document contracts.