GavCoin: Gavin Wood's 2016 experiment that nobody knew was still running

In April 2016, Gavin Wood - the co-founder of Ethereum and inventor of Solidity - quietly deployed a token contract on mainnet. No announcement, no fanfare. Just bytecode.

**What it was:**
GavCoin was a simple experiment: a transferable token where mining one block earned you 1,000,000 GAV. The contract had a built-in miner reward function - if you mined the next Ethereum block, you could call the contract and collect.

The contract has been sitting on-chain ever since: `0xb4abc1bfc403a7b82c777420c81269858a4b8aa4`

**Why it's interesting:**
The deployer address traces back to the Ethereum Foundation's infrastructure. Gavin tweeted about it roughly 25 hours after deployment. There was no ICO, no roadmap, no team - just a contract doing exactly what its bytecode said.

Fast-forward to 2026: the Ethereum History project recently verified the exact source code and compiler settings that produce the original bytecode, byte-for-byte. You can reproduce it yourself with solc 0.1.6 and optimizer enabled.

GavCoin is now live again at gavcoin.eth - static dapp, IPFS-hosted, ENS content hash set. Not affiliated with Gavin, just community preservation.

Full documentation: https://ethereumhistory.com/contract/0xb4abc1bfc403a7b82c777420c81269858a4b8aa4

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