MistCoin: Deployed by the Author of the ERC-20 Proposal. Before the Standard Existed.

The ERC-20 standard defines a set of rules for creating tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. These rules ensure tokens are interoperable with each other and with decentralized applications (dApps), providing consistency in how tokens function across the Ethereum ecosystem.

As one of the earliest experiments in token creation, MistCoin demonstrated the programmability and flexibility of Ethereum's smart contracts. This laid the groundwork for the tokens that would later drive the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement, enabling a wide range of financial applications on the blockchain.

MistCoin's original contract is the 2015 original, and it stays that way. It carries the members the standard was built around, and the allowance machinery that decentralized exchanges use, approve and transferFrom, was added to the standard afterwards. Rather than touch a historic contract, a wrapper was deployed in 2022 to add those later members. Holders can wrap and unwrap freely at any time, so the original contract keeps doing exactly what it has done since November 2015 while $WMC trades on modern exchanges.

ERC-20 tokens are essential to the Ethereum ecosystem because they allow developers to create tokens that can be easily traded, transferred, and used within decentralized applications. The standard provides uniformity, enabling seamless integration with wallets, exchanges, and DeFi platforms.

Yes! The wrapper contract allows you to wrap and unwrap tokens at will and safely. Here is how to do it:

1. Write Contract: createDropbox (create your dropbox where you will drop your OG MistCoin)
2. Read Contract: dropBoxes (read out the dropbox address you just created)
3. Transfer OG MistCoin:Transfer OG MistCoin using the transfer function to the Dropbox address from Step 2
4. Write Contract: wrap (custom decimals 2), wrapping 1 MistCoin = 100 in the input.

Experiments with tokens on Ethereum go back to August 2015, and a handful of contracts with a balance and a transfer function came earlier. MistCoin's claim is a different and better one.

MistCoin is the prototype the author of ERC-20 built while he was working out the standard. Fabian Vogelsteller deployed it on November 3, 2015, filed the proposal sixteen days later, and has said he used MistCoin to test the standard idea. No other token on Ethereum has that relationship to the standard that all tokens now follow. You can verify the contract on Etherscan or on its Ethereum History page.

By the definition in force when it was deployed, yes, and by the standard's own account of what matters, yes.

EIP-20 has a Motivation section, and it singles out which members carry the weight: "The most important here are, transfer, balanceOf and the Transfer event." MistCoin implements all three, and it implemented them before that sentence was written. Every draft through January 2016 named decimals in that list too. MistCoin has that as well, along with name and symbol.

The Ethereum Wallet used the same bar. Its token interface asked for exactly those members, and as late as March 2016 Alex Van de Sande was still telling the ERC-20 issue thread that balanceOf and transfer and their events were all a token needed in order to work.

The allowance half of the standard, approve and transferFrom and allowance, was added to the proposal after MistCoin was already running, and nothing on Ethereum carried it until 2016. Wrapped MistCoin adds those later members so the token can trade on modern exchanges, which is what the wrapper is for.

EIP-20 is credited to Fabian Vogelsteller and Vitalik Buterin. Fabian filed issue #20, titled "ERC: Token standard", on November 19, 2015. The work began months earlier, with Vitalik's "Standardized Contract APIs" wiki page in June 2015.

What was filed that day is not what the name means now. The first version had four of the six methods, an approve that took no amount, no allowance, no Approval event, and five members that no longer exist. The proposal was edited nineteen times, one member was cut by community poll, and the text did not state today's interface until January 6, 2016. MistCoin was deployed sixteen days before any of that started.

Millions of ERC-20 tokens have been created on Ethereum, representing hundreds of billions of dollars in combined market capitalization. Every one of them descends from a proposal whose author was, sixteen days before he filed it, testing the idea with MistCoin. Adoption of the specification as written came later still: the first contract on mainnet implementing all six methods appeared on January 10, 2016, four days after the text stopped changing, and only 1,014 managed it in the whole of that year.

Wrapped MistCoin ($WMC) is tradable on Ethereum decentralized exchanges. You can buy it on CoW Swap or Uniswap. The wrapped contract address is 0x7Fd4d7737597E7b4ee22AcbF8D94362343ae0a79.