TIL the first on-chain proof of attendance token was deployed at Devcon2 in 2016 — three years before POAP launched

Piper Merriam deployed the IndividualityTokenRoot contract in September 2016 for Devcon2 in Shanghai. Each attendee could mint a unique on-chain token proving they were there — fully ERC-20 compliant, written in Solidity 0.3.6.

The idea was simple: if you attended Devcon2, you could claim a token. The minting window closed after the event. No metadata, no images, no marketplace speculation — just cryptographic proof you were in the room.

Three years later, POAP launched at ETHDenver 2019 and turned this concept into a whole ecosystem. But the original idea was already deployed and functional on mainnet in 2016.

What I find interesting is how many "firsts" are buried in Ethereum's early history. The Devcon2 token was a working proof-of-attendance system years before anyone coined the term "POAP." Alex Van de Sande's Unicorn token (April 2016) had a DAO-governed token grinder with quadratic voting. The DAO itself was mid-2016. All of this predates DeFi Summer by four years.

The contract is still on mainnet: 0xdd94de9cfe063577051a5eb7465d08317d8808b6

Source: Piper Merriam's GitHub repo with deployment details and minting logic.

If you're interested in exploring more of these early contracts, ethereumhistory.com has been documenting them — 75+ contracts from 2015-2017 with sourced narratives.