Partnered With:

The Meebits Easter egg that has been hidden for a year is finally unlocked today

Read this article in 9 Minutes

A year ago, Larva Labs hid an NFT easter egg in its new work. Today, encryption enthusiasts receive a Meebits worth 10 ETH after cracking the easter egg.

Original author: Andrew Badr, encryption enthusiast

Original compilation: 0x137, 0x22D, Rhythm BlockBeats

This article is based on the views of encryption enthusiast Andrew Badr on his personal social media platform, which is organized and translated by BlockBeats as follows:< br>

About a year ago, Cryptopunks creator Larva Labs hid an NFT easter egg in his new work. What I'm going to tell you next is the story of how a few friends and I solved the puzzle and received the reward.

If you have been paying attention to the NFT space, you must have heard about the Grails airdrop in the Proof Collective community last month. There are 20 NFT works in this airdrop, each from 20 anonymous artists, each member of Proof can choose one to mint. The artist's name will not be released until all pieces have been cast.

The piece below is Grails #11, which the community knew about before it was unveiled. This should be a mathematical equation, with a pattern similar to starlight, and a path leading to a magical universe, which looks strange and beautiful.

Shortly after the casting ended, the Proof team held held a highly anticipated conference call to unveil the stories and artists behind each piece. Everyone was shocked to learn that Grails #11 was the initial model Larva Labs created for its new project, Autoglyphs. Despite the popularity of every piece in this minting event, Grails #11 currently commands the highest price with a floor price of 45 ETH.

The story should end here, right? No. In fact, after weeks of speculation and analysis, one detail was left out.

On the night of the opening night on March 5th, iceman on the Proof Discord posted the following:

< /p>

This message from him immediately caught my attention as this part of the image does look like the work The subject is a bit out of place. In addition, there is no pattern to these "L"s, so it should be more than just for decoration.

If you look closely at the first row, you will see two shapes, a regular and an inverted "L". I wrote a script to parse these images and convert them to 0's and 1's and found that there are exactly 256 digits divisible by 8, so the first thing I tried was to interpret them as ASCII.

This attempt was successful, and the news I got was: "The secret is in the piggy's number, LL".

This is really unbelievable, as a signature from Larva Labs, no one caught this message during the entire casting process! This would have drastically changed the Grails airdrop experiment. I've been trying to figure out what the rest of that message means ever since. I enlisted the help of a few friends, all of whom contributed to the ultimate solution to the puzzle.

It's worth noting that iceman's post didn't actually get everyone's attention, but throughout the crack I thought others were trying to figure this out too puzzle...

Back on topic, we know that "LL" is the signature of Larva Labs, and guess that the "secret is in Piggy's number" is a clue to hidden treasure. The result is exactly the same. The "piggy" from Larva Labs actually refers to Meebits with piglet attributes.

So we immediately started working on Meebits with piggy attributes. But what does the "number" mentioned in the message refer to? We spent a long time trying to find some information in the ID number of the piggy attribute Meebits. We tried Mod2, spaces between IDs, ASCII, Base32, Caesar ciphers... all sorts of crazy stuff.

Just a few days ago, we noticed that there is another set of numbers hidden in the Meebits of the piggy attribute: the number of the jersey worn.

If you go and see these Mee in jersey bits If you look at the ID number, you will find something unusual, which points to a clue! Check the distribution of IDs and you'll see that they disappear after about 13000 numbers. And if the piggy attribute Meebits wearing jerseys are evenly distributed, then there should be a Meebit whose ID number is after 19000.

After narrowing it down to these 64 Meebits wearing Snutz jerseys, we once again spent a lot of time in dead ends, including converting jersey numbers to binary, Combine the jersey number with the ID number, exploit the jersey color somehow, convert to hex, etc.

Finally we found the right way: concatenate the hex strings from the 64 jersey numbers and use it as an Ethereum private key ! The account corresponding to this private key has 0.025 ETH in it, and there is also a piggy image Meebit as a prize.

With the private key, we can claim Meebit #2858!

如果你想知道的话，那么看起来Larva Labs didn't predetermine the arrangement of these jersey numbers and ID numbers in advance, but created the puzzle with jersey numbers and random ID numbers last May, about a week after Meebits went on sale. This little piggy has been waiting for someone to claim him since May of last year!

Overall, it was a very interesting experience. I'm grateful to Larva Labs for making this puzzle and leaving a clue in Grails #11. Thanks to PROOF and 20 Grails artists for bringing more art into the world.