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The Rediscovery of Charon’s Souls of 2017 (NFT Collectible Relics)

Charon's Soul Napkins
6 min readJan 30, 2023

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If you could sell your soul on the blockchain in exchange for ether — would you?

On October 19th 2017, a smart contract titled “SoulToken” (AKA Soul Napkins) allowed anyone to do so, tokenizing your soul on the Ethereum blockchain for all of eternity.

This article is a brief summary of what these NFTs are, why they’re significant, how they work, and where to collect the souls of those who dared to interact with the contract.

After 1198 days since its last transaction, the SoulToken contract was recently rediscovered in January 2023. The contract creator, Robert Meyers, conceived the idea after a night of drinking with friends, saying:

“At some point, I cannot fully recall why (and why this happened on the loo), I was negotiating about one of my friends’ soul. But I remember that I was a terrific negotiator and was able to purchase his soul for ridiculously cheap 2€. And there is proof! After returning from the loo, he wrote the devilish contract on a napkin and we took a picture of it.”

Translation from German: “Hereby do I, [Name of friend], in full command of my mental faculties and of my own free will, sell my “soul” to [Robert] for 2 Euro.”

“However, irresponsible me already managed to lose the napkin during that night! Soo sad! Only if there was a tamper-proof method to preserve any contract forever… As it turns out, there is: The glorious, holy Blockchain! A couple of days later this idea was born.”

The Soul Napkins smart contract features distinct functions to sell your soul, buy specific souls for sale, transfer souls, view who sold their soul in the “Soul Book”, view the reason why a specific soul was sold, and more.

Only 6 souls were minted in 2017. One more was minted in 2018.

To list a soul for sale, the contract requires the user to record the reason for selling their soul — and the amount of ether they are willing to sell their soul for. Listing a soul for sale is akin to minting a new token. This new Soul Token is not yet “owned” by a user until it is purchased.

Once another user purchases a soul, 90% of the ether is sent to the seller. The remaining 10% is sent to “Charon”, which is a wallet address that the contract refers to as charonsBoat.

In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of the underworld. He carries the souls of those who have been given funeral rites across the rivers that separate the worlds of the living and the dead.

A 19th-century interpretation of Charon’s crossing by Alexander Litovchenko

The contract’s code describes this 10% royalty given to Charon as the “Obol fee”. Another nod to mythology, the Obol was a way of preparing the soul for its journey into the afterlife. The coin is placed on either the eyes, in the hand, or in the mouth of the deceased upon burial to pay Charon for the safe passage of the soul into the underworld.

Furthermore, when you list a soul for sale, Charon requires a small fee (to prevent spam) of 0.003 ETH for advertising your soul in his Soul Book on the blockchain.

After buying a specific soul, the new owner of that soul is recorded in the storage of the contract. The new owner can be viewed by calling the soullsOwnedBy function and querying the original soul’s address. You can also use the ownsSouls function to see the amount of souls an address owns.

With the new wrapper contract, the 10% fee no longer applies once a soul is wrapped into an ERC-721 token.

In addition to souls that can be sold/minted, bought, and transferred — the contract also has a 144,000 supply of an ERC-20 token called “Soul Napkins”. This supply of napkins is different from the supply of actual souls that are bought, sold, and recorded in the Soul Book. In a nutshell, these napkins are a feature of the contract with little meaning and a much larger supply. The Soul Napkins are rewarded to you when you buy someone’s soul. For every ether spent on a soul, you get 10 napkins + one additional bonus napkin. The supply is limited and at most 144,000 napkins are distributed.

After launching the contract on the Ethereum mainnet in 2017, many crypto users wouldn’t dare sell their souls at the time. In fact, in an announcement thread on the BitcoinTalk Forum, some users dismissed the idea with comments saying:

  • “Why do I feel that I am scared of this coin? It feels it is real, selling your soul for ether or on blockchain”
  • “Even for 1 Billion I will never sell my soul, only stupid people will support this project.”
  • “Sell Your Soul? this is so creepy project.”
  • “Everyone who is going to sell his soul for ETH advise urgently will address to the doctor. You crazy people!”

On the other hand, some users admired the novelty:

  • “Unbelievable in a good way, nice”
  • “Yeh — I’m pretty certain this is the best idea I’ve heard of for awhile now”
  • “this is amazing, AH!”

Opinions aside, only six people decided to sell their soul in 2017. Here are those six rediscovered souls of 2017 that were listed for sale, along with their reason, price, and other details below.

2017 Supply of Souls:

SOUL #0:

SOUL #1:

SOUL #2:

SOUL #3:

SOUL #4:

SOUL #5:

In addition to the six souls of 2017, a seventh soul was listed for sale in 2018 for a price of 9999 ETH with the reason, “Seed investment for StartUp.”

As of January 16th 2023, all of the original souls from 2017 have been purchased except for Soul #0 and Soul #4. These two souls can still be purchased through the smart contract by calling the buySoul function with the required amount of ether.

[Disclaimer: Do your own research on this token before interacting with the original contract or wrapper contract. Use at your own risk.]

A new wrapper contract was created to wrap the six 2017 souls into an ERC-721 token. Some have already been wrapped. The wrapped soul NFT can be traded on secondary marketplaces. Click here to view the 2017 Souls marketplace on OpenSea.

If you decide to purchase an unwrapped token in the original contract, you may choose to wrap it with the new wrapper contract. You must transfer the soul twice while wrapping the token, which means you must pay the 10% Obol fee twice. Once the token is wrapped, the 10% Obol fee no longer applies to any future transfers or sales as long as it remains wrapped. (The new wrapper contract only allows you to wrap the six 2017 souls and the one 2018 soul— no later.)

Today, anyone can still mint new souls in the original contract. There is no supply limit. However, there will only ever be six original souls from 2017 — making these few souls one of the most rare and novel relics on the Ethereum blockchain during a time when the technology was still in its infancy.

CREDITS:

  • Robert Meyer for creating the original 2017 SoulToken smart contract.
  • Paragonicalism.eth (@Paragonicalism) for rediscovering the contract in January 2023.
  • Goatishduck.eth (@Goatishduck) for creating the new wrapper contract.

RELEVANT INFO / LINKS:

Nft Collectibles
Ethereum
Cryptocurrency
Blockchain
Nft

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Charon's Soul Napkins

Written by Charon's Soul Napkins

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