How three friends cracked Larva Labs’s secret treasure hunt for a $25,000 Meebit
Larva Labs, the creators of the popular non-fungible token projects CryptoPunks and Meebits, enshrined the private keys for a pig Meebit worth 10 ETH in some digital artwork last year.The three friends were a programmer named Andrew Badr, a person who goes by Apely.eth on Twitter, and an anonymous third person.
On March 5, someone by the name of “iceman” on the Proof Discord server pointed out the unusual pattern aligned at the top of Grail #11.“His message caught my eye right away, because that part of the image really did look separate from the main part of the artwork. Also, the Ls weren't in any kind of regular pattern, so they seemed more than ornamental,” Badr wrote on Twitter.
The seemingly random combination of L-shapes read the hidden message,"SECRET IS IN THE PIG NUMBERS, LL.” So the team tried various methods to interpret the numbers on the pig jerseys, such as mod 2, intervals between the IDs, ASCII, base 32 and Caesar Ciphers.