The History of GavCoin

2014: Early Proof-of-Concept

On April 8, 2014, the official Ethereum account tweeted about early proof-of-concept development showing web-tech integration. Gavin Wood was already building the tools that would make contracts like GavCoin possible.

February 2015: The Source Code

Months before Ethereum mainnet launched, Gavin Wood pushed coin.sol to the official ethereum/dapp-bin repository. The Solidity source defined a token called "GavCoin" with a novel mining mechanism: anyone could call mine() to mint GAV proportional to the blocks elapsed since the last mint.

This was written before any token standard existed. GavCoin uses sendCoin and coinBalanceOf instead of what would later become transfer and balanceOf in ERC-20. The contract was both a demonstration of Solidity's capabilities and a working token.

July 5, 2015: Vitalik's Blog Post

Vitalik Buterin published "On Abstraction" on the Ethereum blog. In this post about cryptography and data structures, he uses "Gavcoin" as his primary example, mentioning it five times. GavCoin was the go-to reference for explaining how tokens and accounts could work on Ethereum. It was already part of the shared vocabulary of early Ethereum developers.

November 13, 2015: Gavin on Tokens

Gavin Wood tweeted "lulz. Bring on the #ethereum tokens" with GavCoin visible in the screenshot. The token ecosystem was just starting to take shape, and GavCoin was already there.

April 26, 2016: Mainnet Deployment

The GavCoin contract was deployed to Ethereum mainnet at block 1,408,600 from wallet 0x20F9...fD2D, a wallet traceable to EthDev, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Genesis block itself. The name "GavCoin" is hardcoded in the constructor bytecode (0x476176436f696e = ASCII "GavCoin").

A second, identical contract was deployed the same day from the same wallet.

April 27, 2016: "Aww. Me and my key"

The contract was deployed at 5:28 PM UTC on April 26. Exactly 24 hours and 40 minutes later, at 6:08 PM UTC on April 27, Gavin tweeted "Aww. Me and my key" - his only tweet that month. Combined with the deployer wallet, the bytecode, and the dapp-bin history, the circumstantial evidence is hard to ignore.

October 22, 2016: Parity Wallet

Gavin shared a screenshot of the Parity 1.4 wallet showing token support. The wallet interface Gavin was building could now display tokens like the one he had deployed months earlier.

GavCoin in Presentations

GavCoin was also discussed in talks about Ethereum's token capabilities:

2025: The Investigation

@cartoonitunes wrote an investigation thread tracing the deployer wallet through the Ethereum Foundation's early infrastructure, bringing renewed attention to this artifact. The thread methodically follows the on-chain trail from the Genesis block through EthDev wallets to the GavCoin deployment address.

A follow-up video further documented the provenance chain.

None of this constitutes proof. Gavin has never publicly confirmed or denied authorship. But the clues all point in one direction.

Still Alive

GavCoin predates the ERC-20 standard by over a year. It is one of the oldest surviving token contracts on Ethereum. The mine() function still works. Anyone can mint. The contract sits on mainnet exactly as it was deployed in 2016, a piece of Ethereum archaeology that is still running.