The tokens in rotation, from Ethereum’s first eleven months. August 2015 to June 2016, when deploying a token was a weekend project and a forum thread. These are the artifacts the machine hands out. It does not print anything: every discovery is a real purchase on the relic’s own market, and what lands in your wallet is the token itself.
Chance picks which relic you get, never how much it is worth. There is nothing to hold out for. Just a different piece of the dig each time.
Fabian Vogelsteller deployed MistCoin on 3 November 2015 as a test token, while working out the token interface he was building into the Mist wallet. Sixteen days later he filed that interface as Issue #20 on the EIPs repo, and it became ERC-20. MistCoin is not itself an ERC-20 token. It has transfer and balanceOf but no approve, allowance, transferFrom or totalSupply. It is the prototype the standard was written from.
Alex Van de Sande of the Ethereum Foundation deployed Unicorn Meat in March 2016, seven minutes after the Unicorn Meat Grinder Association, a quadratic-voting DAO that let holders of the Foundation's Unicorn token grind them into Meat. It is a joke and a primary source at once: one of the first demonstrations of turning one token into another, and of on-chain governance, four years before anyone called that DeFi. Piper Merriam took control of the Association by proposal later that year; in 2025 the same mechanism was used again to fix supply at 100 million and renounce the contract for good.
A self-limiting mineable token, deployed 17 June 2016: you earn HTK by finding a value whose hash against the previous one lands under a target, and every successful mint tightens that target by one percent, permanently. It is the first Ethereum token to put an increasing-difficulty hash puzzle inside the contract itself rather than trusting work done somewhere else. Early mints were done by hand through Mist; after the contract was rediscovered in 2025, people were mining it with GPUs.
The oldest thing in this room. Linagee deployed AyeAyeCoin on 20 August 2015, three weeks after Ethereum's mainnet launch, naming it after a lemur. It is the earliest known Ethereum token with an animal identity, and the earliest known to hand itself out through an on-chain faucet: six million coins, one per call, until they were gone. It predates ERC-20 by more than a year, which is why it needs a wrapper to reach a modern market at all.
VegasCoin was deployed to Ethereum in January 2017, one of roughly a dozen tokens from that era. Built from the ConsenSys MyAdvancedToken template, it shipped close enough to the emerging ERC-20 standard that it did not need wrapping to trade on modern infrastructure. It is the token the machine runs on, and it is the thing you are buying. Triple sevens, obviously.