An anonymous user received 7 ETH (roughly $4,200 at the time of writing) for solving a puzzle that began with an advertisement on a billboard in Warsaw’s metro. Decrypt reports.
An advertisement featuring an Ethereum address and the hashtags #0xPOLAND and #0xPOLANDHEIST appeared at one of the stations. It urged passengers to solve the puzzle to claim the 7 ETH.
According to the organizers, in the Ethereum contract code it was required to call the “solve” function and use the secret phrase to withdraw the funds. Clues were published on a Twitter account named 0xPoland.
The first contained the phrases “Tip: ^[A-Z].*.” and “0x01ccfbfc”. One stated that the message should begin with a capital letter and end with a period, the other — about a checksum part.
Attached to the tweet was an image with a quote. It pointed to the title of a song by the music project Elffor. The participant was to obtain the first part of the secret phrase — “into the dark forest.”
: ^[A-Z].*\\.#0xPoland #0xPolandHeist pic.twitter.com/W1mu0dzK5e
— 0xPoland (@0xPoland) November 19, 2020
A few days later 0xPoland posted another tweet. The phrase hinted at The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the string of characters required the participant to have programming skills. The result was the second part of the code — “into the rabbit hole.”
, ,
#0xPoland #0xPolandHeist pic.twitter.com/VSniO9zrxi
— 0xPoland (@0xPoland) November 23, 2020
The final clue appeared in the print and online editions of Gazeta Wyborcza.
“Many daily newspapers declined our advertisement because they could not understand the concept of the puzzle and preferred to play it safe,” the organizers of the quest noted.
The advertisement contained a phone number. The participant received a recorded message with the missing parts of the secret phrase, which in full read: “From 0xPoland. Into the dark forest. Into the rabbit hole. Where adventures await you.”
☎️
Call me.
0860-908X, (277.9556,2) 23.#0xPoland #0xPolandHeist pic.twitter.com/QKkiSStZUe— 0xPoland (@0xPoland) November 26, 2020
The correct answer was recorded in the smart contract 21 minutes after the tweet was posted.
The organizers explained that they wished to invite developers to join their team “to build a decentralized financial infrastructure.”
In January 2019, street artist Pascal Boyart painted a mural with an encoded puzzle worth 0.26 BTC (about $1,055 at the time) to mark the 10th anniversary of the genesis block of Bitcoin.
Less than a week later, two Twitter users found 12 words that unlocked access to the wallet containing the reward.
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