The wysker Treasure Hunt: Run-through of a Mastermind
Several thousand people participated in possibly the biggest riddle in the crypto universe — the wysker treasure hunt. After 84 days, one diligent hunter found the solution to a ridiculously complex charade and unearthed the treasure: the six parts of a 64 digit private key, which unlocked a wallet containing 100k wys tokens. Congrats, buddy!
Because the riddle makers don’t know who has solved the quest, here’s a walk through of the game from the perspective of the mastermind. It could have started like this…
…wysker posted a challenge to find secret codes hidden in their launch video, which gave access to a crypto-wallet containing 100k wys tokens. How hard can this actually be?! Let’s watch the clip:
Ha, easy! Just from looking at the video once, you can find a little note in the first few frames. The first secret message becomes crystal clear by zooming in:
It says: “You understand the game, but you need to try harder, young padawan.” Challenge accepted! In the YouTube description it said, “your victory is right around the corner”. This must be a hint. Let’s take a closer look at the corners of the video. In fact, a very close look — 990 frames — one by one.
And there it is, in the frames of the subway scene — tiny numbers and letters arranged in the corners of the video, one after the other. Taking screenshots and putting them all together reveals another message. Now it’s getting exciting — take a look:
Hooray, it’s the first piece of the code: “4f32c8ffc9” and a hidden message: “A man walking backwards with his face to the future — S12Ep14”.
What a mystic message — certainly another hint. S12Ep14 looks like a season-episode-combination of a TV-series. But 12 seasons… seems quite a lot to me. The first Google results show two options: the Simpsons and the Kardashians. Wow. Please, let it be the Simpsons 🙏
Starting with everyone’s favorite series, you had to re-watched Simpsons episode S12Ep14 “New Kids on the Blecch”. Indeed, there is a scene in which Bart’s boy-band “Party Posse” sings a song with a hidden message when played backwards. Check this out:
Could this relate to the hint “A man walking backwards with his face to the future”? Maybe you have to play the sound in the wysker video backwards? Earlier, there was a tiny glitch at the end of the movie. Listen to it here:
Is this another piece of the puzzle? The first thought is to play the audio track of the movie backwards, like in the Simpsons episode, but that’s not enough. You had to stretch the file and adjust the sound even further to reveal the next hidden message. Play it again 😉
The message says: “3101@wysker.com” HA! An e-mail address. Let’s say hello and see if someone answers… Bingo! There’s a reply within seconds:
The second part of the key is unlocked: f413be98e9 and with another hint “subject line: Call me an artist” and the message “In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artists signature”. WTF?! To what artist are they referring to? The hint might be related to a graffiti in the video.
In the last scene at 0:25 seconds, a graffiti artist’s tag appears — it says “collapse”. You had to give it a blunt try and respond to the previous email with “collapse” in the subject line! A new reply came right away. But this time it is even more confusing than the one before 😱
It revealed the third part of the code: 23112a36ba. But now you’re stucked with another hint: “Howard Kettler is the only one to decipher the place of the next code. Remember, if a problem can’t be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem.” Wow, can this riddle get any more cryptic??!! It’s been 81 days already since the players reached this stage. Black bars, ambiguous digits and character — a riddle in a RIDDLE!!!!
Who the hell is this Kettler guy? A Google-search reveals, he invented the Courier Font! The hint tells you to reframe the problem. So, the players had to put this chaos into an editor and play around with. They probably didn’t even know what to do with it but then resizing the window did some true magic.
A timecode to a frame in the video appears: 00:00:05:26! They probably checked it out instantly and jumped to the 171th frame in some video editing tool. What did they find???? Nothing!!! So they had to go back to the drawing board and start playing around with the frame as an image file: increase brightness, adjust the saturation, invert colors — still nothing! Scaling, rotating, repositioning… nothing, nothing, nothing!
So here they are, super close to giving zero more f‘s on this whole treasure hunt. The players have been hodling their way through this. What for?! To a ridiculous problem that can’t be solved. But they couldn’t let go, so it became time to enter — GODMODE!
Voilà: Master players found a QR-CODE!!!! They must have hated the game designers, especially the advertising guy called ATN. That was damn hard — let’s take a look where this little piece takes me.
It reveals the fourth part of the code: 88fef5d54e2b8d5 and — surprise, surprise — another hint. Almost there! The webpage says: “wysker holds code (5)” with a link to the wysker website — what could this mean? Can this really be so easy?! I screenshot the logo, play around and turn down the brightness to the very last level.
Awesome — It’s the fifth part of the code (88cfa103cc68) and something that looks like… a geolocation?! That calls for Google Maps! The coordinates lead to Time Square in NYC where wysker had their commercial running in 2018. Might the final piece of the puzzle be hidden in an ad that actually ran on Times Square??????
The players must have been too excited to concentrate being so close to solving this damn thing. Let’s better hurry, some other badass hunter might exactly be at this stage of the game right now. After watching this video over and over, some dots and dashes appear. A MORSE CODE!!!
The sixth and last part of the 64 digit private key: 8b4615c. After 84 days of sleepless nights and self-doubt, the mastermind must have started to sweat and shake when he put the digits together.
🎉💸 100k wys YESSS!! 🎉💸
Without a doubt, this was the work of many! The players collaborated in an exemplary way and the designers build a one-of-a-kind game that went cross-platform with live footage on Times Square. It will always be remembered in the crypto community — this was Tom Holland reporting from Denver, Colorado — good morning, and in case I don’t see ya, good evening, and good night!
