Ethereum's mainnet went live in the second half of 2015, and the chain stayed nearly empty well into 2016. That is exactly why the contracts and tokens that do date to those first years are among the scarcest artifacts in the ecosystem.
Ethereum launched its first live network, Frontier, on July 30, 2015. It was bare-bones, command-line, and aimed at developers willing to operate at the edge of an unproven system, and the chain stayed a developers-only outpost long after the Homestead upgrade arrived in March 2016.
There were no friendly wallets, no token standards in common use, and very few people deploying anything. Most of what we now think of as "Ethereum" (the standards, the tooling, the token economy) did not yet exist. Anything deployed in this window was deployed into near-emptiness.
Just look at how many contracts got made each year. In 2015, only a few thousand. In 2016, a couple hundred thousand. Every year after that? Millions.
Those first bars are real, not missing: 2015 is 0.03% of 2025's height, and even 2016 is barely 1%. Those slivers are the entire point.
And raw contract counts overstate how many early artifacts are tokens. A widely-used token standard didn't exist for most of this window, so only a sliver of the contracts deployed in those first years were token contracts, and fewer still survive with any balance or activity today.
Meet the early-era tokens around the campaign — then the EPOCH token itself and the Thawing-to-Winter seasons: games, the Autumn spend, and Winter giveaways.