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The Unicorn Meat Grinder Association 🦄🍖

A historic Ethereum DAO from March 2016.
Introduced Token Swaps, Upgrades, and Quadratic Voting.

🦄 Learn More! 🍖

The Unicorn Meat Grinder Association 🦄🍖

The Unicorn Token was a gratitude token from the Ethereum Foundation, but it was expensive, non-divisible, and only available to "the pure of heart." The Unicorn Meat Grinder changed that, allowing anyone to "hack your own unicorns into tiny little pieces" and exchange them for divisible meat tokens.

All rules are controlled by the Unicorn Meat Grinder Association, a DAO where "each negative vote is worth 4 support votes, meaning that a tiny vocal minority of 20% of all unicorns can veto any proposal." The Association uses "quadratic voting" where you can send ETH to increase your vote weight.

"While the DAO is in the spirit of April fools, the contract code is 100% real and functional." It was created to showcase token upgrades, contract-to-contract interactions, semi-random functions, and quadratic voting.

— Alex Van de Sande, March 2016

Contract: 0xc7e9dDd5358e08417b1C88ed6f1a73149BEeaa32

🐦 Original Announcement
Ethereum Grinder Announcement

Ethereum Twitter Announcement

The Association

Back to Unicorn Meat homepage

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Unicorns Killed

0

Proposals

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Old

🦄 Unicorn Killers Hall of Fame 🍖

Proposals

No proposals found.

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Grind Unicorns 🦄

Grind your Unicorns 🦄 to get Unicorn Meat 🍖 using the original 2016 Unicorn Meat Grinder Association contract.

How it works:

  1. Checks your Unicorn balance: View Contract
  2. Asks you to approve the Grinder to spend your Unicorns: Approve
  3. Calls grindUnicorns() to exchange Unicorns for Unicorn Meat: Grinder Association DAO
  4. The Meat Grinder dispenses the Unicorn Meat to you: Meat Grinder
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Governance

The minimum quorum required to pass a proposal is - vote weight. Vote weight is calculated as your unicorn token balance multiplied by your bribe (the square root of ETH sent plus gas costs). This means you can increase your voting power by sending ETH with your vote.

Proposals have a debating period of - minutes before they can be executed.

Votes against a proposal are weighted - times more than votes in support, meaning a vocal minority of 20% can veto any proposal.

Unicorn Token: -

Meat Token: -

Meat Provider: -

Owner: -

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Create Proposal

The address that will receive ETH if this proposal passes.
The bytecode that will be executed if the proposal passes.
Optional: Send ETH to increase your vote weight.
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Frequently Asked Questions 🤔

  • What is the Unicorn Meat Grinder?

    The Unicorn Meat Grinder is a governancecontract that also takes your Unicorns 🦄, sends them to unicorn heaven (the contract), and sends you back Unicorn Meat 🍖 tokens. Grinding a Unicorn can yield about 5000 pieces of meat, but depending on your luck you might get more. Each token is divisible to 3 decimal places, so each single unicorn will be exchanged for more than a million smaller units.

  • How much Unicorn Meat do I get per Unicorn?

    Each Unicorn grind can yield about 5000 pieces of meat, but there's a small chance you'll get much more than that. The amount is calculated using a semi-random function, so your results may vary. Since each meat token is divisible to 3 decimal places, each unicorn exchanges for more than a million smaller units.

  • How do I grind my Unicorns?

    Important: Do not send unicorn tokens directly to the grinder! You need to approve first, then grind. The dapp on this page will handle the approval for you.

    1. Go to the Grind section on this page or use the Grinder Association contract and call the "grindUnicorns" function with the number of unicorns you want to grind.
    2. Wait a few seconds and you'll receive your Unicorn Meat tokens!
  • How does quadratic voting work?

    Your vote weight is calculated as your Unicorn token balance multiplied by the square root of the ETH you send (plus gas costs). This means a vote that sends 100 finney will be 10x more weighted than a vote that sends only 1 finney. The Association "might take bribes" when counting votes — this is quadratic voting, which helps prevent simple 51% attacks by making it expensive to buy large amounts of voting power.

  • How do I vote on proposals?

    To vote on a proposal, you need to own Unicorn tokens. Your vote weight is based on your token balance and any ETH you send with your vote (quadratic voting). Votes against a proposal are weighted 4x more than votes in support, meaning a vocal minority of 20% can veto any proposal. You can vote using the Grinder Association contract on Etherscan or through this interface.

  • What technical features did this pioneer?

    The Unicorn Meat Grinder demonstrated several important Ethereum functionalities: token upgrades (locking an old token and sending a new token back), decentralized token swaps (a contract receiving tokens and executing functions), and quadratic voting.

  • Is there a Unicorn Killers Hall of Fame?

    Almost! You can see the Unicorn Killers Hall of Fame on this page, which lists all the addresses that have ground Unicorns, along with their kill counts and first kill dates. The original announcement mentioned a partially constructed Hall of Fame, and the on-chain version is in progress. It will contain more features than originally envisioned.