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- The creators of popular NFT projects, CryptoPunks and Meebits, secured the private keys for a pig Meebit worth 10 ETH (or about $25,000) in digital artwork last year. On March 14, a group of three friends managed to crack this code.
- A piece called Grail#11 from a private collective of 1,000 artists created an NFT drop dubbed Proof, which turned out to be from Larva Labs.
- The three friends were a programmer named Andrew Badr, a person with the username Apely.eth on Twitter, and an anonymous third person is a team who cracked the code.
Last year, the creators of CryptoPunks and Meebits, the popular non-fungible token (NFT) projects, kept the private keys for a pig Meebit worth 10 ETH (or about $25,000) in digital artwork. A group of three friends managed to crack the code on March 14.
Among the three friends are Andrew Badr, a programmer, a person with the username Apely.eth on Twitter, and an anonymous third person. Badr, in a tweet, shared that Proof, a private collective of 1,000 artists, created an NFT drop that consisted of 20 artworks from 20 anonymous artists. The artist’s name was scheduled to be released after the mint closed.
One of the pieces, called Grail #11, turned out to be from Larva Labs. Grail #11 quickly became the most valuable piece in the Proof NFT drop. The piece is actually a prototype for a collection of mathematically generated art.
On March 5, a person with the username “iceman” on the Proof Discord server pointed out the unusual pattern aligned at the top of Grail #11.
Badr shares on Twitter that he noticed the message and found that part of the image actually looks separate from the main part of the artwork. Besides, the Ls weren’t in any kind of regular pattern, making it seem more than ornamental.
Badr uses an ASCII (or American Standard Code For Information Interchange) or a system in which numbers correspond to 128 English characters wrote the code to turn L’s into 0s and 1s.
The random combinations of L-shaped turned out to be the hidden message, which read as, “SECRET IS IN THE PIG NUMBERS, LL.”
Further, Apely.eth on Twitter shared that Andrew was quick to guess that the secret code must be referring to the Meebits pigs. After looking around for a while, he and another friend aimed at the pigs wearing jerseys and were successful in finding one digit on each of the jerseys.
The three friends then used different methods to interpret the numbers on the pig jerseys, such as Caesar Ciphers, ASCII, base 32, mod 2, and intervals between the IDs.
After many unsuccessful attempts, the friends noticed something unusual, which was that the NFT IDs create a 64 digit string that can be used as an Ethereum private key form when you place the Meebits in order of their jersey number.
In the next moment, the team found a wallet address containing 0.025 ETH and the Meebit #2858, solving the year-old puzzle. Badr recalls it as a fun experience.
Meanwhile, there was no response to the request for comment by press time as to what they plan to do with the NFT prize.
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Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.
