Ethereum's mainnet went live on July 30, 2015 as Frontier: bare-bones, command-line, developers only. No friendly wallets, no token standard in common use, almost nobody deploying. Anything from that window was deployed into near-emptiness, which is exactly why it is scarce today.
Ethereum saw 6,292 contracts deployed in 2015 and 232,811 in 2016. In 2025 alone it saw 22.3 million — 2015 is 0.03% of that, and even 2016 is barely 1%.
And raw contract counts overstate the early haul — a widely-used token standard didn't exist for most of that window, so only a sliver of those contracts were tokens, and fewer still survive with any balance today.
Meet the early-era tokens around the campaign — then the EPOCH token itself and the Thawing-to-Winter seasons.