Unicorn Meat

In February 2016 — six months after mainnet launch — the Ethereum Foundation launched a fundraising initiative to support ongoing development.

EF leader Alex Van de Sande (avsa) deployed two contracts: the Foundation TipJar and Unicorns 🦄 — a 0-decimal non-standard ERC-20.

Donating 2.014 ETH (~$20 at the time) to the TipJar — as instructed on ethereum.org/donate — minted 1 Unicorn. To date, only 2,717 have ever been created.

avsa later raised the price to 42,329 ETH — a "beeple" — after the Everydays: The First 5000 Days sale.

A month later, avsa deployed the Unicorn Meat Grinder Association DAO — allowing any Unicorn holder to "grind" their Unicorns into Unicorn Meat 🍖, a 3-decimal non-standard ERC-20.

It demonstrated multiple on-chain firsts: a DAO with quadratic voting, token swaps, and token mutations — all in 2016.

Unicorns and Unicorn Meat are the only coin tokens ever created and announced by Ethereum — and likely the first on-chain April Fool's joke.

Only 7 Unicorns have ever been ground, producing approximately 9,000 Unicorn Meat tokens. The rarity is structural and permanent.

A week after launch, Piper Merriam — a core Ethereum developer — passed a DAO proposal to seize control and take 5 ETH for themselves. avsa, Vitalik, and the community laughed. Ethereum lore was born.

In July 2025, a Unicorn holder repeated the move: passed a proposal, transferred DAO ownership, minted 100 million tokens, renounced the contract, and wrapped it for trading.

The Unicorn Meat 🍖 contract is renounced — no admin keys, no rugpull vector. The story is complete and immutable on-chain.

The team is now building: the Unicorn Killers Hall of Fame and improvements to the Grinder DAO — picking up where avsa left off in 2016.

Historic Ethereum tokens are having a cultural renaissance. Collectors seek provenance — on-chain artifacts from 2015–2016 are the rarest in existence.

Unicorns and Unicorn Meat are the only coin tokens ever created and announced by Ethereum. There is no comparable provenance anywhere in crypto.

The story is complete and immutable: origin (avsa, 2016) → the coup (Piper, 2016) → the revival (webtrue.eth, 2025) → community. Every step is on-chain.

Active development: Unicorn Killers Hall of Fame, Grinder DAO improvements, and growing community — this is not a static artifact, it's a living project.