Larva Labs secret treasure hunt solved with a jersey

Three people have finally cracked the Larva Labs secret treasure hunt after nearly a year.

Andrew Badr, Apely.eth, and an anonymous third person all worked together to decode the puzzle, revealing private keys to pig Meebits worth 10 ETH. The private keys were enshrined inside a digital artwork.

Badr narrated the experience on Twitter. According to him, it started when Proof, an artist collective, dropped 20 artworks by 20 anonymous artists. One of the pieces in the drop, the Grail 11, turned out to have been made by Larva Labs.

Grail 11 was a mathematically generated art that became the most valuable in the collection. On March 5, a Proof Discord user called Iceman noticed the unusual pattern at the top of Grail 11 and called attention to it.

Badr saw this message and realized that Iceman might be up to something. He wrote a code that turned the Ls on the art into binary codes of 0 s and 1 s.

He then used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange ASCII, which interprets the binary codes into 128 English characters, and got this hidden message, LL. After some investigations, he was able to identify that this message referred to the Meebits pig. Badr recruited his friends, one of whom was Apely.eth, to help with the hunt.

The three of them identified the pigs wearing jerseys and collected all the numbers on the jersey. They used various means such as ASCII, mod 2, Caesar Cyphers, and base 32 to interpret jersey numbers.

After days of trying to see if the jersey numbers mean something, they discovered if they arranged the meebits based on the jersey number. They ended up with a 64 digit string, which was an Ethereum private key. The private key led to a wallet containing Meebit 2858 and 0.025 ETH.

Apely, Badr also corroborated Badr's revelation, while also pointing out that he would be looking forward to finding more puzzles in future NFTs of Larva Labs.

Larva Labs recently sold the rights of the Cryptopunks and Meebits NFT collection to its rival in the industry, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs.