Prepunk Club retweeted
Even today, rare ens from the first 1k are discovered. The blockchain doesn't lie.
Always a pleasure to be enabler in these cases - thanks for registering with Vision! ๐งก
I FOUND IT ๐
After almost 4 years of searching, the mystery of the 107th ENS name is finally over!
To understand what happened, you have to remember how ENS worked back in 2017 ๐๐ป
Names had to be at least 7 characters long, and they did not all become available at the same time. The hash of each name decided when its auction could begin. So changing even one character gave you a completely different hash and potentially a much earlier opening date.
I think this guy simply wanted the name โshay.โ
Shay is a real name. In Hebrew it means โgift.โ Maybe it was his name, someone he knew, or just a username he liked. We will probably never know that part.
But after looking through everything this wallet registered, I am pretty convinced that โshayโ was the name he wanted. All the extra yโs were just padding.
The normal 7 character version, shayyyy, was not available until June 24. It looks like this guy did not want to wait that long, so he just kept adding yโs and checking again.
Every extra y created a new hash and gave him another chance of finding a version that was available earlier.
Eventually, he found one that opened on May 5:
shayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
That is โshaโ followed by exactly 50 yโs.
53 characters in total.
He started the auction that same day.
And this is where it gets really convincing:
The same wallet later came back for shorter versions. First sha with 15 yโs, then 5 yโs, and finally 4 yโs.
As each version became available, he slowly worked his way back toward the name he actually wanted.
His entire thought process was sitting there onchain this whole time!!
For years, I treated #107 like a password. I (and probably many others) threw at it hundreds of gigabytes of dictionaries, rules, masks, brute force, custom wordlists and every pattern I could think of. Nothing worked.
Because in the end, this was not really a brute force problem. I had to stop trying to crack the hash and start trying to understand the person who created it.
Once I did that, it clicked.
The hash matches exactly.
Nearly three years after this post, and even longer since I first started looking, the last missing name from the first 1,000 ENS registrations is no longer missing.
Sometimes you do not crack the hash.
You crack the story behind it.
Mystery solved๐งฉ
Prepunk Club retweeted
To understand the future you need to understand history.
@ensdomains's early days have always been more interesting to me than its roadmap. and with ENSv2 in the works; documenting and preserving that history matters more, not less.
Our resources was overdue a big update since last year. It's live now. Docs rewritten from scratch, new features in Verify tool and more.
Learn: docs.prepunk.club
Verify: verify.prepunk.club
Quiz: quiz.prepunk.club





