Rodeo

It took only 5h to solve this crypto puzzle once the final clue was sent to collectors that fulfilled conditions - winning wallet seed phrase shown below.

Congrats to 0x380 👏

prize pool: 0.1708 ETH

txn hash: 0x739eef3d9548894555065b5eb52d771128dfdf515abe96be838f391192627b93

The treasure hunt started as a series of 25 Rodeo posts, each containing a clue. This was the first post on Jan 1st that explained the rules.

Computational architect. Some structure, mostly chaos. Co-founder {protocell:labs}

https://protocell.xyz/

23 of those posts contained a single word, part of the BIP39 standard for encoding wallet seed phrases. These can have 12 or 24 words in them.

The final word clue was missing and would be sent to collectors that collected all 25 posts on @rodeodotclub

The creative social network. ✳︎ rodeo.club

It was never revealed if the wallet in question uses 12 or 24 words, or their order.

In fact, even if you knew all 24 words of a seed phrase, it would take you max 24! attempts to find the correct one.

That's 6.2x10^23 guessing attempts...

620,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I assumed this would make it infeasible to crack the seed phrase using brute force - but I would still NOT recommend anyone revealing any part of their seed phrase (huge security risk!)

Prize money consisted of proceeds of all 25 Rodeo posts - 0.1708 ETH = $566 at the time

So how to find the right combination of words?

Turns out you can include messages in transactions on Ethereum. Transaction that transferred the prize funds to the wallet included a message:

0x4F6E6C79206F6464207468617420636F756E742E

Only odd that count.

This ensured that the solution is fully public and accessible. Only the 19 collectors with a full set of 25 collected clues got the last word clue in a DM.

If you only included words from odd-numbered posts, you will get a 12-word seed phrase that led you to the correct wallet.

Around 5h after sending the last word clue, the riddle was solved and the funds transferred out of the wallet. I am still investigating who the owner of 0x380 is 🕵️‍♂️

txn hash: 0x739eef3d9548894555065b5eb52d771128dfdf515abe96be838f391192627b93

Thank you to all who participated!

I hope you had fun and also learned something about crypto wallet security.

Here is link to my Rodeo profile page with all the posts.

Thank you to all who participated!

I hope you had fun and also learned something about crypto wallet security.

Here is link to my Rodeo profile page with all the posts.
https://rodeo.club/@luka/posts