The clues were found in the description part of the Supremes when they were minted. Starting from Supreme 001-015, there was a single 6-7 character string that looked like garbage, but decoded to legible text using ROT-13. From Supreme 015-175, the ROT-13 cipher only worked on odd numbers, and then from 176 to 228 all numbers were used again.
From Supreme 16-52 on ONLY EVEN NUMBERS there were 4-letter words that appeared to be jibberish.
From even numbers on Supremes 54-128 there were pairs of two digits.
From even numbers 130-173 there were six-digit numbers.
And Supreme 174 simply had the number '15'.
Supremes 229-333 did not have any hints on them.
Additionally, questions 16 and 23 had additional info to be used with these numbers after they were decoded from ROT-13:
Sixteenth is not here keyword is theta.
Twentythird is found elsewhere the keyword is fiddle.
Using Vignere and Polybius ciphers when combined with the keywords for 16 and 23, we were able to decode two additional questions and one additional (partly bogus) hint:
Sixteenth is yours your quest is close to ending This ones a word that means stiff or unbending.
You've found twenty three lets hope you're not late. This one is performed at a park, rink, or lake.
Now if three of your answers end in 'ment', choose one, subtract, and then add back the 'e'.
* I say partly bogus because it turns out that the actual answer for the ment hint didn't require adding back an e as stated by the question. This was an honest mistake, but it really added to the fun by throwing us for a loop. This hint could have been referring to endorsement -> endorse from question 6 or arrangement -> arrange from question 24.
1. The start means to stop the first step toward the clink. ARREST
The hardest part about this question was determining whether it was two clauses or just one. I.e.,
"The start means to stop. The first step toward the clink"
Or
"The start means to stop the first step...."
We collectively agreed that the dual-meaning for the word arrest (to stop as in heart arrest) vs going to the clink (jail) made arrest the ideal answer
2. When second you likely have/to have/to take more time to think. ALONE
This was one of the hardest ones because we had a laundry list of viable answers. What made it worse was that a critical piece of information was missing from one Supreme that wasn't minted yet. So the question could have been...
"When second you like to take more time to think."
"When second you like to have more time to think."
"When second you likely have more time to think."
Even once we found out the missing piece, we still had a large list of answers we had to try.
Patient, apart, alone, old, young, idle, notable, etc.
Fortunately, alone was one of our favorite answers we liked to test with, and it turned out to be the correct one.
3. Third is a meeting of those voters sent. CONGRESS
For this question we had a few answers, but Congress easily stood out as the best from early on.
4. The mob puts your feet in the fourth if no rent. CEMENT
For this question we had fire and water come to mind as well, but the mob reference was referring to the legend about the mob encasing the feet of people they didn't like in cement and dropping them in the water. Also, the rhyme fit with sent and rent.
5. Fifth from dinosaurs trapped in soils beneath. OIL
This is ultimately what kept us from finding the solution for about a full week. We were so sure of the answer fossil to this question because it fit so well. Also, bone was a close second. It wasn't until alex.ada suggested oil as an alternative answer to this question and soggy waffles included it in his tests that were were able to find the final solution. I personally wrote off oil as a sub-optimal answer so I excluded it from my own tests, but it turned out to be the correct answer 😑
6. Sixth upon candidates unions bequeath. ENDORSE
Another semi-tough one. We had a handful of other answers we tested against this question:
endorse, donate, pledge, vote, credit, come, judge
judge and come seem to not fit very well, but because of the additional clue about removing ment and adding back an e we were determined to make comment or judgment work as an answer somewhere, and this was one of the few that might have fit. Turns out we were JEBaited by that "hint" and endorse was right all along.
7. Seventh you take when you suffer a hit. DAMAGE
We actually thought this was abuse initially and left that as our answer for a while. But then gary suggested damage and we knew it had to be that because of Jeb's love of D&D.
8. Eighth you stand up for when she wants to sit. LADY
This one we though of lady fairly early and then never came up with anything better. Relatively easy.
9. Ninth is how horseshoes come to land 'round the post. TOSS
For this, we were sure the answer would be either pitch or toss. We also had ring as a third option, but it had to be one of those so we tested with all of them.
10. Tenth and a pink dress what young girls want most. PONY
We had a handful of answers for this at first too:
Romance, pet, doll, pony, candy, puppy, kitten
But we narrowed it down to mostly doll and pony. The latter ended up being correct.
11. Eleventh you do so your paper stack grows. INVEST
Another very hard one. Eligible answers:
invest, print, copy, work, earn, document
We didn't feel particularly great about any of them, but Invest was still near the top of our list and ended up being the answer.
12. Twelfth describes deserts but not freshly washed clothes. DRY
One of the easier ones. We got dry pretty early and never looked back.
13. Thirteenth the movement in rivers defines. CURRENT
Another relatively easy one. For a little bit we entertained answers such as valley, canyon, etc., but the question says movement IN rivers not OF rivers. Current is the correct choice.
14. Fourteenth a part of especially for lines. SEGMENT
Perhaps the easiest one. We had almost no discussion on this after we landed on segment since that is what you call a part of a line.
15. Fifteenth you do to acquire without ADA. TRADE
This one was difficult. Trade and exchange were our top answers, but we weren't particularly confident on them. We came up with a lot of alternative answers, but none quite as good as those two.
16. Sixteenth is yours your quest is close to ending This ones a word that means stiff or unbending. RIGID
This question came as a result of a vignere cipher. Fortunately, the question itself wasn't too difficult. Rigid came to mind pretty quick and using a thesaurus we weren't able to find anything that would've fit better.
17. Seventeenth is hoisted up pole mast or post. FLAG
Really straightforward. Just flag.
18. Extremely eighteenth and incredibly close. LOUD
For the first day we were a little stumped on this. But then we tried too Google it and got lucky to see a film/novel by the title "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close". We knew that loud had to be the answer after that.
19. Nineteenth the attribute needed by experts. SKILL
IMHO this was definitely the hardest question. There are TONS of answers that could fit this question...
judge, practice, wisdom, skill, talent, genius, opinion, etc.
This was further complicated by the fact that we needed a question to take away ment and add back an e. There were only a few words in the English language that also became BIP-39 words that would have fit. Those were...
argument -> argue
judgment -> judge
comment -> come
...and a few other obscure words that didn't really fit anything. And of those, judgment seemed to fit best and in this particular question. Personally I was dead sold on judge here for that reason so I didn't often test with other words. Ultimately though, that clue ended up being JEBait :kek: and skill was the correct answer.
20. Twentieth the asset Arrakis exports. SPICE
If you've watched or read Dune then it was a dead giveaway. Otherwise, it only took a simple Google search to figure out what "Arrakis" is. They export spice.
21. Twentyfirst is a character right in the middle. NEUTRAL
This one was difficult as well and we tried a lot of things using "character" to refer to alphabetic characters and characters from popular movies and stories. We ended up agreeing that neutral in regards to a center-aligned character in D&D (i.e., True Neutral) fit Jeb's personality the most.
22. Twentysecond for when you buy after you pay. OPTION
Another very difficult one. We had option and call at the top of our giant list of potential answers, but we didn't feel particularly great about it. Fortunately, the former turned out to be correct.
23. You've found twenty three lets hope you're not late. This one is performed at a park, rink, or lake. SKATE
This one decoded from a Nihilist cipher using the keyword fiddle. Once we had the whole thing decoded, we were sold on either skate or hockey as the answer. But due to the rhyme, skate fit much better.
24. The last is for flowers to make a bouquet. ARRANGE
We had arrange early on, but began to doubt that as the answer in favor of a couple other answers like bundle or ribbon. Good thing we kept arrange high on the list though because it ended up being correct.
So how we going about testing these answers? We actually all had different methods, which gave us a very good variety of things to try. Alex used his RPA bot, gary and soggy waffles had Javascript and Python scripts to check for valid wallets and then subsequently check if they were empty or not. Jane and Benjamin did things the old-fashioned way, which was valuable to make sure we weren't overthinking it. What I did was use an open source tool called btcrecover that works with Cardano Shelley wallets/addresses. Basically, all I needed to do was input that address that Bernal was sitting at and my "best guess" for what the whole seed phrase would be, and then a few less-relevant CLI options to get it running in the right mode. The tool was able to find the answer as long as I had AT MOST two words incorrect. With three or more incorrect it wouldn't find the answer. It took 11-12 hours to run each time and it turns out I just got really unlucky with my guesses, as I had 3-4 incorrect each attempt. But it WAS an increibly fast method of checking answers, with over a billion seed phrases checked each run through. I highly recommend this tool for others trying to attempt seed phrase cracking challenges.
https://github.com/3rdIteration/btcrecover
This hunt was definitely a different style than the hunt for ronin for me. Less rabbit holes for sure, more process of elimination style. My brain thinks a little differently than the more tech oriented team Mates. I concentrated on digesting each question to think of all possible answers and reading every word on BIP to come up with new possible words. I'd say overall we had most of the right answers in the beginning but when it wasn't working we started to overthink and thus came up with too many possible words further complicating. Every few days I think we'd basically go back through all the questions and answers attempting to narrow the words down. I also like color coding answers to get a visual of which ones we were solid on and which ones less solid. One answer everyone thought was solid from the beginning was fossil. That is what caused the hunt to drag on for us thinking it was one of our 100% answers. Then the riddle about remove "ment" add back the e really threw us off as we kept changing solid answers to attempt to put in judge to fit the riddle. Our team worked even smoother than last hunt as we had the experience down and we started from the get go as a team. Last hunt everyone attempting to start out solo or in twos made things take longer and building trust with a team. We had the trust, friendships, and experience to get the mission done again. And let's not forget commitment! Not many understand the sacrifice and the time and devotion it takes to win one of these hunts. We had the commitment and put in the time and effort as a team to win. Thank you Jeb for yet again another brilliant hunt, thankful for all you do for the Dead Rabbit Ressurection Society!
The mint began and we were eager to get started. I knew we had an advantage as developers familiar with the CNFT space. I usually watch the chain when a mint I'm interested in is happening. As the Supreme mint was happening, I grabbed all the metadata as the mint progressed. I already had this code, and just needed to modify it a little bit to give us additional insight into the challenge. I saw the additional data on the last line of the description. Once the pattern was identified, I updated the code to automatically decipher the ROT-13 lines, and from there we worked toward the other puzzles in the metadata. As new Supremes were minted, we would keep getting updated intel.
From my perspective it started with the strings of characters in the Metadata. I noticed that a bunch of supremes had the strings of characters and I posted it here, about 5 minutes later, Bre started posting what he had found from the first 100 supremes and we started working off of that. The team started decoding that into the riddles. We began posting our best answers to the riddles. We got to the point where we felt we had the correct answers. Some riddles we had more than one possible, so we tried to use reason and logic to narrow it down. When we felt we were close enough to start attempts at recovering the wallet, we employed some automation to help out (cause why work harder when you can work smarter). Then, much like last time, we reinserted a discarded potential answer into the seeds being tested, 'oil' , and we solved the puzzle. I wish I had pushed harder for 'oil' when I first suggested it on the 11th but 'charm' still haunts me and I didn't want to be the one steering the group in the wrong direction.
Reading the bip list quickly became a daily activity. Which very quickly lead to more and more potential answers stacking upon an an already inconcieavably long list of potentail answers.
So, after days upon days of brainstorming and pouring through the bip list it became apparent that manually inputting what amounted to far more than 100 million potential seed phrases wasn’t going to be doable.. lol
The next step obviously required an automated solution. We tossed together a python script that utilized cardano CLIs, python libraries, and tangocrypto. Basically the script that ultimately found Bernal did the following:
- Checked if the menomic’s checksum was valid
- Checked against our local “database” whether or not the mnemonic was one we’d already seen
- Derived a wallet id from the mnemonic
- Derived a wallet address from the wallet id
- Derived a stake adress from the wallet addr
- And then checked the balance of that address for anything none zero
Instead of checking the wallet balance, we could have simply compared our stake addresses with Bernal’s publicly available stake address, but we weren’t sure how tricky Jeb and team were being. It was possible that Bernal was not in the wallet we were trying to “crack”.
The first night the script was fired up, it ran against the following:
RESULTS:
TANGO CRAPPED OUT
Duplicates :: 651
Total checked :: 1526067
Total balances checked :: 5445
Total valid stake addr :: 0
VALID WALLETS WITH A BALANCE::
[]
Unfortunately it crapped out after checkng 1,526,067 wallets. The culprit was either Tango refusing to allow us to connect anymore or a power outage during some wicked thunderstorms. Either way, the next morning, the word list was pruned down a bit….(53 million is definitely nicer than 107 million)
NUMBER OF PERMUTATIONS 53,747,712
And then, an hour or so later… HUZZAH!!! Somewhere around the 2 millionth query Bernal was found!!!!
Total checked :: 2431381
Total balances checked :: 3510
VALID WALLETS WITH A BALANCE ::
[(('arrest', 'alone', 'congress', 'cement', 'oil', 'endorse', 'damage', 'lady', 'toss', 'pony', 'invest', 'dry', 'current', 'segment', 'trade', 'rigid', 'flag', 'loud', 'skill', 'spice', 'neutral', 'option', 'skate', 'arrange'), '24d2ada18c9951030ae9837dfdc1bc76478e9a5b', 'addr1qxf0fgu79ka5dxv2xp5yge9s3f44kluek2zmglxv5hlk2m8vcnlf6a5nzgu5gt802puhwpa7erk0jrx4segjtx9v29fsh4egtk', stake1u8kvfl5aw6f3yw2y9nh4q7thq7lv3m8epn2cv5f9nzk9z5cmrap3g, 1580280)]
TANGO CRAPPED OUT