An anonymous message has just appeared on the Bitcoin network, challenging anyone who can read history. On August 22, 2026, someone inserted a 255-byte message into block 963,629. The content is brief but has immediately sparked a hunt - the creator announced a Bitcoin wallet puzzle whose key is hidden inside Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis Block.
Galaxy Research, which identified this transaction a day later on August 23, noted that the block containing it was mined by the Foundry USA pool at around 19:45 UTC. This puzzle message was inserted into the OP_RETURN space, a specific data field for including text in a transaction. “I created a Bitcoin puzzle using information contained in Satoshi’s Genesis Block,” the anonymous creator wrote on the blockchain.
Public Data from Day One
To hide this wallet key, the creator claims to have used very low entropy. He purely relies on public data that has existed since the Genesis Block, or block 0, was mined by Satoshi on January 3, 2009. The open components that puzzle hunters can piece together are quite varied: ranging from the timestamp number sequence 1231006505, the nonce 2083236893, the Merkle root code, the public key sequence, to the newspaper headline quote immortalized by Satoshi.
The hash of Bitcoin’s very first block, 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f, is likely also included in the list of elements making up this puzzle key. The transaction carrying this message has a total size of 500 bytes and only cost 250 satoshis to execute - equivalent to a rate of 0.60 sat/vbyte. The Galaxy Research team labeled it an “oversized OP_RETURN”, given that the message size of 255 bytes takes up more than half of the total transaction space itself.
Original Coins Cannot Be Moved
It is important to note that although this puzzle borrows data from the first block to secure its path, the prize up for grabs is not Satoshi’s original 50 BTC in the Genesis Block. Those first-mined coins cannot be moved because they were never included in the spendable output set by the Bitcoin code. As a result, this mysterious wallet holds separate coins that purely adopt the historical information structure as their lock.
As of writing, there is no verification on the network indicating that anyone has solved this puzzle, let alone moved the reward locked inside its wallet. The secret key is still hiding in plain sight, scattered among the sequences of numbers and public traces that have been copied by every mining computer worldwide since the network’s first day of life.
As reported by crypto.news.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only, not financial advice. Cryptocurrency assets are highly volatile and carry significant risk. Always do your own research (DYOR) and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
