MistCoin

In the early years of Ethereum, EF leader Alex Van de Sande (avsa) led a team called Mist — focused on mass adoption by building Dapps that make Ethereum simple.

Fabian Vogelsteller was brought in as lead Dapp developer. Both avsa and Fabian were keenly interested in contract standards — and in the Mist Browser and Ethereum Wallet as the entry point for the ecosystem.

On Nov 3, 2015, just before Devcon 1, the team released a feature allowing anyone to create tokens in the Ethereum Wallet, a no-code UI for deploying a token, announced on r/ethereum the same day.

Upon releasing it, Fabian created MistCoin and sent half the supply to avsa.

MistCoin's source became the template for hundreds of tokens created through the Ethereum Wallet in the weeks that followed. 140 contracts sharing its exact shape were deployed in the first nine weeks alone, and Fabian and avsa were handing MistCoin out on Reddit.

A few days later, avsa demoed the feature as a keynote speaker at Devcon 1. Fabian gave a dedicated talk on standardization.

16 days after creating MistCoin, Fabian filed issue #20, worked up from a draft gist with Vitalik Buterin. Seven weeks of revisions later it became ERC-20: Token Standard, which defines every standard token in existence today.

In 2022, avsa and Fabian were approached to help fund a group interested in historic NFTs. avsa donated hundreds of thousands of MistCoin for giveaways, and a wrapper was created to make MistCoin a standard ERC-20 tradeable on any DEX.

Fabian donated a large additional amount — half placed for sale — funding a full-range V2 pool locked for 100 years. Permanent, manipulation-resistant liquidity.

MistCoin, the prototype its author built while writing ERC-20, is now available for all to collect. The provenance chain is complete and verifiable on-chain.

MistCoin is the ERC-20 prototype. Deployed by Fabian Vogelsteller, credited author of the standard, 16 days before he filed the proposal that became EIP-20. In his words, he deployed it to test the standard idea.

It is the working artifact from inside the standard's own development, deployed by its author while he was still deciding what the interface should be. The chain of provenance runs Fabian → avsa → Devcon 1 → ERC-20, and every link in it is dated and public.

The provenance is not a resemblance argument. Recompiled with the period-correct solc 0.1.6, MistCoin's published source reproduces its deployed bytecode exactly, and the contract the Ethereum Foundation handed the world in Alex Van de Sande's December 2015 tutorial is that same source, character for character. It is all checkable: the contract record, issue #20, and the ERC-20 Code Trail.

The V2 pool locked for 100 years ensures liquidity is permanent — no rug vector, no admin keys, fully on-chain.