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SECRET WAS IN THE PIG NUMBERS: Programmer cracks Meebits code to claim NFT prize
Coinhead
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A New York programmer has detailed how he and some friends managed to decode a secret message in an NFT, which turned out to be a cryptic clue: SECRET IS IN THE PIG NUMBERS.
But solving that riddle of those pig numbers enabled them to claim a Meebits pig avatar — an NFT worth at least 4.5 Ethereum (US$11,6410).
Andrew Badr and his buddies cracked the code in a Protoglyph NFT created algorithmically by Larva Labs, the creator of both CryptoPunks and the Meebits collection.
The NFT was part of the Grails drop by Collective Proof held last month – 20 artworks by 20 anonymous artworks. To mint one, you needed to be a member of the Proof collective, meaning you had to own one of the 1,000 PROOF NFTs. Prices start at 33 Ether (US$84,000).
“Soon after minting closed, the Proof team held the much-anticipated call where the story and artist behind each piece were revealed. When #11 turned out to be by @larvalabs, and in fact a prototype of their seminal Autoglyphs project, everyone went wild,” Badr tweeted.
Badr recounted how an eagle-eyed member in the Proof chatroom caught a detail on the edge of the artwork.
The night of the reveal (March 5th), “iceman” in the Proof Collective chat room posted this: pic.twitter.com/EJpAtZnGN1
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
It turned out that the regular and upside-down Ls spelled out binary code that Badr and his buddies were able to decode to “SECRET IS IN THE PIG NUMBERS -LL”
If you look closely at that top row, there are two shapes: regular and upside-down Ls. I wrote a script to parse the image and turn those shapes into 0s and 1s. As it turned out, there were exactly 256 bits—divisible by 8—so the first thing I tried was interpreting them as ASCII.
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
All that happened 9 long days ago, on March 5th. Since then, I was trying to figure out what the rest of that message meant. I recruited a couple friends to help, and we all contributed to the yesterday’s final solve.
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
They figured the “pig numbers” had to refer to Larva Labs’ well-known pig Meebits… and eventually deduced that the numbers were the pigs’ Snoutz Jerseys.
So, while “LL” is the signature, “SECRET IS IN THE PIG NUMBERS” seemed like a clue pointing to a hidden treasure—which is exactly what it turned out to be. Coming from Larva Labs, the “pig” reference seemed like it had to mean the pig Meebits. https://t.co/grnXM92lQM
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
It was only a few days ago that we noticed that there’s another set of numbers within the pigs: some of them have jersey numbers. https://t.co/c49Aq8zY6v
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
They were able eventually to decode the jersey numbers into an Ethereum private key, which they used to claim a wallet containing Meebit #2858.
Looking at only these 64 Meebs with the Snoutz Jerseys, we once again spent way too long chasing dead ends. (Convert the jersey numbers to binary, combine jersey numbers with the id numbers, use the jersey colors somehow, interpret them as hex, etc etc).
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
With the private key in hand, we were able to claim Meebit #2858!https://t.co/KcYoZoUhJM
— Andrew Badr (@andrewbadr) March 14, 2022
The Meebits have a floor price of 4.5 Ether, but someone had already offered 10.01 Ether for Meebit #2858 yesterday.
The jersey numbers had been public and available for decoding since the Meebits were created last May, Badr tweeted.
Badr added that it was a “really fun experience” to solve the puzzle.
