01
The Artifact
A contract no one was
looking for.
On the 19th of September 2016, Vitalik Buterin deployed a small contract to Ethereum. It has one function, and anyone can call it.
Call it, and it builds a brand-new contract on-chain — then walks away. Call it again, get another one. He never named it in public and never explained it. We read the contract and recovered the name from its code: moose().
Specimen — the artifact
cat. 0x42dD…1457
- Address
- 0x42dD263Af905666
Eff278d9C96024784 07351457 - Deployed
- 19 September 2016, on Ethereum
- Deployer
- an address controlled by Vitalik Buterin
- Function
- 1 — moose()
- What it does
- each call deploys one new contract
- State
- live · still callable today