Postmortem Riddlethon part I: Kudos to the Winners & Lessons Learned
One of its kind, the first cross-chain crypto-treasure hunt for blockchain tech newbies, Riddlethon has come to an end successfully. We’ve got to admit that we are very happy with the result, as we were also first-timers organizing this novel event.
Prep
- ~2 months started to outreach to co-organizers
- ~1 month started to dev communities to encourage participation
- Published articles in different languages(thank you Zhiwei Hu, Takuya Fujita and Juan Antonio Lleó for helping me)
- Organized 5 weekly calls(alternated calls for people in Asia and America, 5am calls were brutal, but proud of myself 😉)
- Hosted 1 Spanish webinar to promote Riddlethon, CosmWasm, and Cosmos thanks to Cryptoplaza, a great occasion to enhance our visibility for a Spanish-speaking audience.
Results
Riddles and hints were revealed on the Riddlethon website to over 200 participants from 39 countries and we provided explanatory video and live mentoring sessions as well as interactive chat answers on the Hopin platform.
Participants solved 43 out of 50 easy, 11 of 15 medium, and all 5 hard riddles.
👏🏽 Big applause to the Riddlethon winners 🏆 ;
Alcides, Ben, Chris, Harriet, Ian, Jaeseung, Jiwon, Kritsada, Severin, Sheldon, Taiki, Takumi, Takuya, Yasumasa, and Zac.
Some of the riddles’ solutions (videos or documents) are coming up soon, so stay tuned!
Do you want to know how winners solved riddles? Check out Orkun Kulce´s step-by-step guide below.
How to solve a riddle
We’d like to thank Orkun Kulce for the step by step guide:
Task definition is simple: reach to the end.
If you don’t ask questions, you won’t get help. Except for hints which were revealed one by one as the event progresses.
You will not have endpoints, documentation links in the beginning. This is the first skill in the blockchain space that you need to learn: find your way in the blockchain lands of the internet wormhole.
Riddles are categorized by their difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard. Pick a category that fits your skills.
Let’s pick an easy one and here is a random look-alike text: 837BF5C7292BB98C3D76E2F5223A1D1BE2BF73610223B0961A733B0D9E810158
This is the first clue of a riddle. Riddle is a chain of information hidden cross-chain that one clue leads to another.
You feel the dopamine rush of randomness and novelty you see and try to make sense out of this cue, knowing the next one will be more exciting.
You head to a block explorer and see values similar to this value. And the first cue is a block hash. Block hash does not contain any information that indicates the network this hash belongs to. You have to go through sponsor network explorers to find this out. It is in nyancat(IRIS Network testnet): https://nyancat.iobscan.io/#/tx?txHash=837BF5C7292BB98C3D76E2F5223A1D1BE2BF73610223B0961A733B0D9E810158
After this step, you learned the block hash concept thus tinkered with several block explorers.
Then in the memo field, there is a new value(go ahead check it): wasm120prg4r4tyflpa3hr6ymw4fhqf6k0s52k9rcxe
Hmmm, this looks different. Again you go-ahead to a block explorer to see values like cosmos1, iris1, regen1, etc. Then you understand this is an address and all cosmos-based chains use this address format.
You go to https://musselnet.cosmwasm.aneka.io/accounts/wasm120prg4r4tyflpa3hr6ymw4fhqf6k0s52k9rcxe and what? there is no account?
Actually is a smart contract address it is not visible in Aneka explorer. So to understand you need to query the contract state:
wasmd query wasm contract-state all wasm120prg4r4tyflpa3hr6ymw4fhqf6k0s52k9rcxe https://rpc.musselnet.cosmwasm.com:443 — output json
Oh, I did not mention that you need to find the wasmd repo and download the source code and compile. Another challenge!
This is the response:
{
“models”: [
{
“key”: “000101”,
“value”: “InNpZ24gdGhlIHR4IGluIGh0dHBzOi8vcGFzdGViaW4uY29tL1dFQjI0ZnNrIHdpdGggbW5lbW9uaWM6IGZvb3QgYXJteSB0b290aCBwZXQgZGV2ZWxvcCBjaGFtcGlvbiBkZWJhdGUgZHJ5IHNvbGRpZXIgY2hhcmdlIHNwbGl0IGxlb3BhcmQgc3RyaWtlIHJpdmFsIGZyb3duIHdhbnQgYmVmb3JlIGtpc3MgdHlwZSBmb3J1bSBicmFja2V0IGZhcm0gdHJhY2sgZW1iYXJrIGFuZCBzZW5kIHRvIHVzIg==”
}
],
“pagination”: {}
}
Getting there! The next clue is hidden in the value but what is this encoding? This is base64 encoding and command to decode: base64 -d And the result:
wasmd query wasm contract-state all wasm120prg4r4tyflpa3hr6ymw4fhqf6k0s52k9rcxe $MUSSEL_NODE — output json | jq “.models[0].value” -r | base64 -d
sign the tx in https://pastebin.com/WEB24fsk with the mnemonic: foot army tooth pet develop champion debate dry soldier charge split leopard strike rival frown want before kiss type forum bracket farm track embark and send to us
Congrats new lead.
In the link, there is an unsigned transaction. To claim the reward, sign the transaction and post it to the chain and prove it by sending us the hash.
In this phase few new skills are learned:
- First meeting with wasmd keys
- Importing a mnemonic
- Signing a generated transaction by reading it from the file
- Then broadcast
Send the transaction hash to us and you get the reward and the riddle is struck out which means it is claimed.
The riddle you see up there is an easy one. The medium requires a higher skill level and you can pick skills up on the way. There was even a hard riddle that required you to understand IBC, set up a relayer and a connection, and send tokens between two networks.
External insight
We have got very positive feedback about Riddlethon I from both participants and event sponsors. Sharing some direct feedback from participants during and after Riddlethon I below;
(Riddlethon is so much fun, I can´t stop following it)
We had so much fun organizing and experimenting with the event. The feedback was tremendous and participants seemed to love the experience! We hope to expand our reach to new participants and gain new partnerships with different projects to offer more unique riddles!
Feedback survey
As per the feedback survey right after the event, participants’ general feedback was positive, as 70% responded that this was a successful event and they will participate in the next one.
Riddlethon I was unique in many ways;
- Riddles(missions) related to multiple blockchains let participants learn about each project.
- The barrier to entry was lower compared to conventional hackathons where you are asked to perform more difficult tasks.
- Reward distribution with 5 organizers’ tokens.
- Free to join, you Learn and Earn at the same time!
- More exciting and fun than normal hackathons.
Ideas of how to build on the Riddlethon format;
- Clear reward distribution information before the event start
- Create some teamwork required tasks to encourage collaboration, interchange of knowledge would be more interesting
- The pattern was pretty much the same for easy riddles, so once you understand how it works you could easily solve others. Make the riddles move diverse
- Level the gap between easy and medium riddles
- More participants
Some testimonials
Alcides, a programmer @Enzyme started the Riddlethon from scratch. He got to know Riddlethon randomly from the webinar one day before. He wasted the first 4 hours as he didn´t understand, then he watched the explanatory video and got on the right track. He started to solve a couple of easy ones then moved to medium ones and to hard ones. He crushed the hard IBC riddle…(4 out of 5)
To us, Takuya and Takumi are friendly faces as they have won HackAtom V with a project based on CosmWasm. Also, Takuya has been actively supporting us by outreach to the Japanese dev community including writing Riddlethon article in Japanese. He voluntarily yielded easy riddles even after he solved for other beginner-level participants, thanks a lot!
Takumi pointed out the same riddle patterns were repeated. Takuya expected there will be more and more chains with CosmWasm and suggested next Riddlethon topic related to IBC and DeFi.
Harriet from UK impressed me a lot as she has zero previous coding experience, no blockchain tech knowledge whatsoever, and a working mother of young children like me. I got inspiration and motivation when I interviewed her. She has never used Github before and yet, managed to solve 2 easy riddles. Her takeaway is that this learning through systematic search is fun. When she cracked it, she really liked that joy. She enjoyed figuring things out a little bit at a time, as hints were added on the website over time.
¨I had a really great time. Riddlethon I was a really good introduction to the basic blockchain technology, when hackathons scare me. Riddlethon was a great way of learning new things, not just reading stuff on reddit, an actual practice over a fun competition¨
Jiwon has been working for 5 years as a software engineer and started to learn blockchain early this year. He might be a professional blockchain engineer one day, but now he is at the exploring and learning stage. He advised ¨traditional¨ software engineers out there not to be scared and learn by practice. ¨Passionate community engineers would help you out if you leave some issue on the GitHub repo¨, says this South Korean engineer.
He also cleared all the riddles like Alcides, a true champion!
It is amazing to see people catching up on the concepts in just two days.
Thank you
A massive shout out to Terra Network, Secret Network, Regen Network, and IRIS network for supporting and funding this event. Also, thanks to OmniFlix network for your support and technical tips, thank you Cryptoplaza for giving us the opportunity to meet Spanish-speaking communities, hope we can keep collaboration.
Special thanks to ICF, Tendermint, and Stakefish; without your generous support, we would not have been able to organize this event.
Who will be the co-organizer(s) with Confio next time?
🤫
Let’s meet again at Riddlethon II to find out!
