What is Unicorn Meat?
Unicorn Meat is a historic token made by the Ethereum Foundation March 24, 2016. A month after creating Unicorns 🦄 as an offering in return for anyone who donated 2.014 ETH to the Ethereum Tip Jar, Alex Van de Sande of the Ethereum Foundation devised what was conveyed as an April Fool's joke – a Unicorn Meat token and a Unicorn Meat Grinder Association contract allowing any Unicorn holder to grind their Unicorns for Unicorn Meat, as well as make proposals to change how the operation functioned. The Unicorn Meat protocol demonstrated on-chain token swaps, token upgrades/mutations, and quadratic voting DAOs for the first time in history.
Unicorn Meat (w🍖) is a wrapped version of one of the earliest tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The original Unicorn Meat token was created in March 2016 by Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth), head of UX at the Ethereum Foundation, creator of the Ethereum Wallet and Mist Browser, and co-creator of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
Unicorn Meat originated as part of a system of smart contracts built around the Ethereum Foundation Tip Jar. The Tip Jar rewarded anyone who donated 2.014 ETH with a Unicorn token. Van de Sande then deployed the Unicorn Meat Grinder Association, a contract that allowed Unicorn holders to convert their Unicorns into Unicorn Meat tokens through an on-chain mechanism called the Meat Grinder. This represented the first known token-to-token swap on Ethereum, predating Uniswap by over two years.
The Grinder Association also served as one of the earliest DAOs on Ethereum, featuring quadratic voting where voting power scaled with the square root of tokens held. In April 2016, Ethereum core developer Piper Merriam used the DAO governance mechanism to take control of the contract and claim 5 ETH, demonstrating early on-chain governance dynamics.
The token was publicly announced by the official @ethereum Twitter account on April 1, 2016. Etherscan independently recognizes Unicorn Meat with the official note "Created by Avsa of the Ethereum Foundation." The deployer address is the same one that deployed the Ethereum Foundation Tip Jar, which carries the Ethereum Foundation name tag on Etherscan.
In July 2025, the Unicorn Meat contract was acquired through a DAO proposal that reached quorum in the Grinder Association. 100 million Unicorn Meat were minted and the contract ownership was permanently renounced, meaning no additional tokens can ever be created. A wrapper contract (w🍖) was deployed to add modern ERC-20 compatibility, enabling trading on Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges. The original 2016 tokens can be freely wrapped and unwrapped at a 1:1 ratio at any time.
The Bureau of Internet Culture (BIC), a DAO dedicated to collecting and preserving culturally significant digital artifacts, added Unicorn Meat to their treasury in 2025, recognizing it as an artifact of internet culture and Ethereum history. The token is documented and verified on EthereumHistory (ethereumhistory.com), a registry of early Ethereum contracts.
Unicorn Meat is tradable on Uniswap on both Ethereum mainnet and Base L2, with liquidity also available through CoW Swap.
