Hello Cryptomaniacs, Akropolitans,
This article is an update about the Akropolis community event, the Quest, that I already talked about in my previous Medium article.
You will find all the necessary informations to understand the basic quest principles in this medium article, so feel free to check it before reading this.
For this quest, six official rounds are planned, there are two officals rounds left, but the Akropolis team has the right also to purpose additionnal rounds !
And this was the case for this one.
Topic of the day : Traditional Finance
Stock exchange ? IPO ? 2008 Subprime crisis ? This round was focusing on what is traditional finance and what is the current situation in this sector.
From there, for first task of the round, the goal was to emphasize unusual advantages of crypto over traditional finance or share feedbacks about 2008 economic crisis.
It is always interesting to read different perspectives about specific topics. Especially within the cryptospace, with people coming from all the parts of the globe to form communities.
I liked Daryl (Akropolis community member) feedback where he was talking about Memes. A new way in the digital world and new generation to create entertainment and attention.
In most medias, we can already see the usage of GIFS going through the roof. In professional networks like LinkedIn, manners are also changing in terms of contents.
Thanks also to Elon Musk for all the support of memes community. Go check his twitter feed, the guy has a pretty nice sense of humour, or at least the community managers working for him.
Memes will probably continue to grow, take more and more space in all mediums of informations, as they are a part of all the new generation, of social medias, internet, and lighting speed information transfer.
And crypto is one of the most funny place in terms of memes, we might be losing tons of money, or earn a lot, but it is still done in a funny and entertaining context, and memes play a big part for that.
After this task 1, speedrun started 4 hours and 10 minutes later, with the puzzle.
Nothing special in my opinion to mention, I have already done 4 puzzles since the beginning of the quest, and this is always a cool way to masterize our Google skills.
If you like to lurk on the web to find informations, you may find this kind of challenge really fun !
On a side note, if you like to lurk on the web and Google is your best friend, come and play as well the flash quizzes that happen randomly during the day besides quest rounds.
The best riddle to date that we got as a flash quizz question was this one : “When a certain sign of the zodiac ascends, I will stamp the egg of an ancient sea monster that is hidden on an utopian base”
Multiple words to find, good luck ! ;)
Next part of the quest was the search part.
We had a pastebin link that gave us access to a google excel document, and along with that a hint. I got personally this one :
“X : Virgin America IPO; Y: ADH”
I personally did the puzzle quite fast, but the google document riddle gave me some hard time.
The document was composed of :
Country names, their codes on three letters, and an information about a indicator “IBRD Loans and IDA credits (DOD, current US$)”
On the right side we had many years listed and amounts specified for more than 250 lines.
So first of all, I tried to analyze the hints, and look for Virgin America IPO amount on the web.
After that I tried to find this amount on the document but there were different values and it didn’t correspond exactly to the IPO value.
After some time, I understood that we were talking about the IPO year, and not the value. The columns on the right side of the document had as a header a year.
So I knew what was my column reference, the Virgin America IPO year date : 2014.
I needed then to know which was the line of the excel document with the second hint : “ADH”.
I tried as well to find a country code, but nothing. I also tried to make a connection between the code and the different columns letters, nothing.
In the end, I realized, thanks to a hint shared by Akropolis admin, that these letters corresponded to a number.
A > 1
D > 4
H > 8
148 was my line reference !
I finally found a value with the X (2014) and Y (148) correlation, which was in fact a binary number. I tried to find a way to encode/decode this number, and it finally gave me the answer of this step. Finally !
Besides that round, I want to talk about also a new event that started on the same day, with a win prize of 1000 points (1000$ worth of AKT tokens) for only one winner, the “Find and decode” event.
The description of this event is the following : “Throughout the quest, we will be hiding a part of the code in some places connected to Akropolis. The first person who will be able to find all pieces and decode the word will win.”
Are you ready for an adventure like Cicada 3301 ? Hurry up ! The first two pieces of the puzzle are hidden in Akropolis ecosystem (can be quest, website, anything connected to Akropolis).
They will be available until 13 PM UTC on this article release date, so if you read this now and you are interested, it’s time to show your talents.
Additional informations have been shared in the Akropolis telegram community for guidelines about this challenge.
I hope you will all participate in the next parts of Akropolis Community Quest, and thank you for reading this article.
Links about the project :
Akropolis website : https://akropolis.io/
Akropolis Quest Wiki : https://wiki.akropolis.io/101/
Kind regards,
Alexis
