Colored Coins
Vitalik's first project

Before Ethereum,
there was Colored Coins.

2013. Vitalik shipped the first crack at on-chain apps. He hit a wall and built Ethereum to fix it. The repo is still on GitHub, last commit thirteen years ago. We are picking it up.

$COINS contract → Vitalik's repo
Official Colored Coins video, 2013 · watch on YouTube →
The story in 6 lines

Vitalik's first chapter,
told straight.

No marketing. No fluff. The lineage runs from a Bitcoin experiment in 2013 to the chain that runs the industry today. We are bringing that same energy back, with a CTO who is here to finish what got left on the table.

1

Vitalik's first project

Before $ETH, before Dapps, Vitalik was building Colored Coins on top of Bitcoin. This is where it all started.

2

Dapps before Dapps

Issue tokens, run apps, settle on chain. The whole vision for what Ethereum became, drafted on Bitcoin first.

3

The wall

Every new transaction had to backtrace the full history of the coin. Bitcoin's design could not carry that weight.

4

The fix became Ethereum

Vitalik split the transaction list from the state tree. New txs read a concise state, no replay. That is Ethereum.

5

Cited in the whitepaper

Colored Coins is referenced in the official Ethereum whitepaper. The lineage is on the record.

6

$COINS, new CTO

We are running this under the ticker $COINS with a CTO who is here to finish the original idea. Address is public. Receipts on chain.

The problem (2013)

Backtrace every transaction

Colored Coins forced nodes to replay the full history of a coin every time it moved. The deeper the history, the heavier the chain. It could not scale.

→
The fix (2015)

State tree, no replay

Ethereum split the transaction list from the state. New txs read a concise snapshot, no backtrace. Same idea Vitalik was chasing on Bitcoin, finally working.

Lineage

From a 2013 repo
to a new chapter.

Real dates. Public artifacts. The same idea moving through three eras.

2013
Vitalik builds Colored Coins on Bitcoin
First serious attempt at on-chain apps. Repo goes public on GitHub.
2013
Hits the backtrace wall
Bitcoin's design cannot carry stateful tokens at scale. Project stalls.
2013
Drafts the Ethereum whitepaper
Same problem, new design. State tree replaces full-history replay.
2015
Ethereum mainnet launches
July 30, 2015. The fix ships. The industry follows.
2026
Colored Coins, picked back up
New CTO. Original vision. Finishing what got left on the table.
From the original team page

Vitalik. Listed in the Colored Coins team.

Pulled from the Colored Coins website via Wayback Machine. Top-left of the team grid, alongside Meni Rosenfeld, Alex Mizrahi and Yoni Assia.

Colored Coins official team page showing Vitalik Buterin
Wayback Machine receipt

Vitalik Buterin, listed in the team

Sourced from the official Colored Coins site, archived in 2013. His bio is straight from the page itself.

"Vitalik Buterin is a computer science student at the University of Waterloo... His main current areas of involvement include writing for Bitcoin Magazine, programming for Egora, and developing Bitcoin software libraries."
Source: coloredcoins.org team page, archived 2013
In his own words

Vitalik on Colored Coins.

Real tweet, real account, real timestamp. Pulled live from x.com.

On the record

vbuterin / coloredcoins.

No quotes. No screenshots that get edited. The repo is sitting on Vitalik's GitHub right now, untouched for thirteen years. That is the receipt.

V
vbuterin ✓
github.com/vbuterin
Public repo. Pinned to Vitalik's account since 2013. Last commit thirteen years ago. The first crack at on-chain apps, frozen in place the moment the Ethereum whitepaper went live.
Repo: github.com/vbuterin/coloredcoins Last commit: 13 years ago
In the Ethereum whitepaper

Colored Coins,
cited by name.

Read it for yourself. Section: prior work, on ethereum.org.

Colored Coins mentioned in the Ethereum whitepaper

The receipt

The Ethereum whitepaper opens with a list of prior work. Colored Coins is in there, by name, with a description of exactly the backtrace problem Vitalik then went on to solve.

"Colored coins, the purpose of colored coins is to serve as a protocol to allow people to create their own digital currencies, or in the important trivial case of a currency with one unit, digital tokens, on the Bitcoin blockchain."
Source: ethereum.org/whitepaper
$COINS · CTO on chain

Same mindset.
New chain. New CTO.

No anon ghost. No promises. A wallet you can watch and a ticker that runs the same energy Vitalik brought in 2013, on a chain that can finally carry it.

$COINS

The CTO is here to finish the original idea.

The first Colored Coins shipped without a fix. The second one is not going to. Watch the address, read the receipts, decide for yourself.

$COINS 0xbC36aA5a5560f9C58837dA445FDe3dA8552D7703