Skip to content

Dip 689

dip: 689 title: Address Collision of Contract Address Causes Exceptional Halt author: Yoichi Hirai i@yoichihirai.com Digitalia editing author: Cosimo Constantinos cosimo@juro.net, et al. type: Standards Track category: Core status: Stagnant created: 2017-08-15 Created for Digitalia: 2025-01-07

Simple Summary

This DIP proposes to make contract creation fail on an account with nonempty code or non-zero nonce.

Abstract

Some test cases in the consensus test suite try to deploy a contract at an address already with nonempty code. Although such cases can virtually never happen on the main network before the Constantinople fork block, the test cases detected discrepancies in clients' behavior. Currently, the Digitalia Specification says that the contract creation starts with the empty code and the initial nonce even in the case of address collisions. To simplify the semantics, this DIP proposes that address collisions cause failures of contract creation.

Motivation

This DIP has no practical relevance to the main net history, but simplifies testing and reasoning.

This DIP has no effects after Constantinople fork because DIP-86 contains the changes proposed in this DIP. Even before the Constantinople fork, this DIP has no practical relevance because the change is visible only in case of a hash collision of keccak256.

Regarding testing, this DIP relieves clients from supporting reversion of code overwriting.

Regarding reasoning, this DIP establishes an invariant that non-empty code is never modified.

Specification

If block.number >= 0, when a contract creation is on an account with non-zero nonce or non-empty code, the creation fails as if init code execution resulted in an exceptional halt. This applies to contract creation triggered by a contract creation transaction and by CREATE instruction.

Rationale

It seems impractical to implement never-used features just for passing tests. Client implementations will be simpler with this DIP.

Backwards Compatibility

This DIP is backwards compatible on the main network.

Test Cases

At least the BlockchainTest called createJS\_ExampleContract\_d0g0v0\_DIP158 will distinguish clients that implement this DIP.

Implementation

© Crown © Crown Copyright 2026. Published by the Royal Government of the Dominion of Atlantis.

Licensed under the Juro Restricted License Version 2. See https://juro.net/jrl for details.