Summary

Gelotto Keys (GKEY) is a rare token (1000 max supply), with a speculative but potentially high value. (GKEY will be used in the first annual Gelotto Grand Prize Game). The scarcity and potential value of GKEY has created a significant amount of hype surrounding the ways to acquire the token.

There are numerous ways to acquire GKEY, but these methods involve dividing a fixed amount of GKEY among a large number of participants, resulting in small amounts of fractional GKEY being provided to a large number of individuals. Though many investors have been diligently trying to acquire as much GKEY as possible, nobody was anywhere close to acquiring a full (1.0) GKEY.

Until the story of Gerry.

Introduction

The premise of the treasure hunt was simple: 1 GKEY would be sent to a wallet address. The 12-word seed phrase for this wallet would be hidden using a variety of methods that could be hinted to the Gelotto community over time.

Then, the event would be announced, unleashing the community to hunt for this seed phrase. Like a virtual Easter Egg hunt straight out of Ready Player One. (If you haven’t read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, it’s a fun read. And much better than the movie.)

Ideas

The initial ideas the Gelotto team devised for hiding parts of the seed phrase were fairly basic, such as creating solvable word games that hid seed words, creating math puzzles, concealing words in a hidden picture game and so on.

But the team decided to add another layer. Gelotto has a webpage, a blog, a Discord server, an active Twitter account, a subreddit, and both of its co-founders are doxed and have provided links to their LinkedIn pages. Why not hide parts of the seed phrases using several of these mediums and let the players hunt for clues?

After discussing some initial ideas, the 12-word seed phrase for the GKEY wallet was divided into four parts, each part having three seed words. Each part of the seed phrase was then assigned to a different member of the Gelotto team.

The team members were given free rein to hide the seed words as they saw fit.

The Hunt

Kicking Off the Event

Gelotto unofficially kicked off the event on August 10 by tweeting an obscure string of characters alongside an image from The Office that hinted at a GKEY in a box, which led to an impressive amount of sleuthing among the Gelotto community for such an obscure message.

The event was more officially kicked off the next day with a Twitter post: An image of an astronaut on a planet full of ice cream cones, telling us that “Gerry from Gellati” has lost the seed phrase to unlock his wallet. Pay attention, and you might be the one to find his seed.

Words 1-3

Rizbe (notRizbe) wanted to start participants off with a set of slightly more obvious clues, with the idea that a sense of progress would keep the community motivated. He created a set of three word games and released them to the Twitter and Discord communities.

Rizbe’s philosophy was simple: Keep the momentum going.

The word games were not particularly easy, but the task that needed to be done to uncover seed words 1-3 was fairly straightforward.

Words 4-6

Tritador adopted the opposite philosophy: Make the hunt for clues require some attention, so that finding something feels rewarding.

Having taken up the hobby of making frequent price-discussion posts on Gelotto’s Discord server, he began attaching images of the GLTO price chart to each post. Subtly added to the text at the top of each chart was an Imgur link.

The Imgur link in turn led to an image in which the three seed words were hidden. The image depicted Gerry, so any hunter who made it that far would immediately know he was on the right track.

The words were concealed using a small font and colors that blended in with various portions of the image, and were placed where they would be somewhat difficult to see, but visible if the image was examined closely.

The image created an unintentional trap for some hunters: After finding a single word in the image, some participants assumed they had completed the task for the image and did not look for additional words.

Words 7-9

Homestead Cosmonaut has always maintained a strong focus on community engagement. Following this theme, he chose to release a series of obscure hints to the Twitter community over a period of time.

As an impressive technical feat, the hunter that solved the seed phrase did so before the hint for the ninth word was actually released, using a list of possible wallet seed words in combination with the other words he had found.

Words 10-12

Daniel (dgabri3le), being the tech-savvy coder behind Gelotto, was planning to hide text input fields throughout the Gelotto website, blog, and possibly the developers’ Linked-In pages, where the obscure string of characters Rizbe had used to kick off the event could be input to reveal seed words.

However, deploying the beta main net games, working on the upcoming Junoswap liquidity pool and SCRT portion of the GLTO airdrop, and various other tasks consumed his time, and Tritador took over the task, ultimately choosing to hide these three words in the Gelotto blog.

One of the blog articles was modified to include three additional links, each link leading to an image that displayed the seed word or at least strongly suggested what the word was.

Conclusion

Momentum for the hunt was near-constant. Participants were quite enthusiastic. Some formed teams, some were quite vocal about the discoveries they had made, some strategically kept quiet, some even offered to sell the words they had found. The amount of technological savviness (and a bit of overthinking) that was displayed by the hunters was impressive.

Any time the momentum slowed, Rizbe, true to his philosophy, was quick to offer hints and keep the hunt moving.

The event was easily as fun (or more) for the Gelotto team as it was for the players, as the team truly enjoys kicking around ideas, interacting with the community, and expressing themselves through games and puzzles.

By August 13, a member of the community successfully accessed the wallet and removed the GKEY. And Gelotto now has its first GKEY whale, holding at least 1.0 GKEY!