How to get the address of the contract creator

Question

I'm trying to find out if there is a way to get the address of the contract creator if I only know the contract address and the contract interface (ABI)?

Answer 1

There is no explicit web3.js method for finding the contract creator address. If you wanted to accomplish this with web3.js, you would essentially have to loop through all the previous blocks and transactions subsequently searching for the transaction receipts via web3.eth.getTransactionReceipt. This will return a contractAddress property which can be compared to the contract address you have.

Here is an example utilizing web3.js (v1.0.0-beta.37):

const contractAddress = '0x61a54d8f8a8ec8bf2ae3436ad915034a5b223f5a';

async function getContractCreatorAddress() {
    let currentBlockNum = await web3.eth.getBlockNumber();
    let txFound = false;

    while(currentBlockNum >= 0 && !txFound) {
        const block = await web3.eth.getBlock(currentBlockNum, true);
        const transactions = block.transactions;

        for(let j = 0; j < transactions.length; j++) {
            // We know this is a Contract deployment
            if(!transactions[j].to) {
                const receipt = await web3.eth.getTransactionReceipt(transactions[j].hash);
                if(receipt.contractAddress && receipt.contractAddress.toLowerCase() === contractAddress.toLowerCase()) {
                    txFound = true;
                    console.log(`Contract Creator Address: ${transactions[j].from}`);
                    break;
                }
            }
        }

        currentBlockNum--;
    }
}

getContractCreatorAddress();