Arts & Cryptocurrencies

How is this newly established asset of arts and collectibles connected with cryptocurrency and blockchain world? First of all, a creation of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto (what a great name for an artist) could be considered an art in many segments, but we can talk about that some other time. Today I want to tell you about CODEX PROTOCOL and how it perfectly merges these two worlds.

What Is The Codex Protocol?

Codex Protocol is developing an infrastructure to make Art & Collectibles simpler and to create a decentralized title registry for them. This will be backed by a strong consortium.

The Codex will operate as a secure store of provenance, giving peace of mind to the collector. The platform can exist as an industry protocol and will give the opportunity to build decentralized applications on it. The company itself is already adding two application to it Biddable and Sellable.

Another aim of the company is to diversify crypto wealth with Art & Collectibles as a financial asset and also to build a strong title registry application on the blockchain. The Art & Collectibles scene is in high need of this. Unlike every other asset class, no main title registry for the Art & Collectibles exists.

A cooperation of art enthusiast and industry experts have been brought together to ensure that The Codex will be integrated into a large system of 5,000 auction houses. The aim is to become an industry standard.

Currently, it is problematic to know ownership of Art & Collectibles because ownership is necessary for transacting, ensuring, lending, and many other applications.

Solution Offered

CODEX is bringing decentralization and blockchain technology to the arts & collectibles. It offers to create a decentralized registry of the objects which can be used by anyone for a variety of purposes, such as buying an insurance, loan, owner's history, and authenticity. Blockchain verifies and authenticates the physical objects before registering them on its ecosystem. The first industry they are targeting is the art houses. More than 5,000 auction houses have backed their project.

Securing and verifying the value of each of the assets in the art house will bring transparency and lower the fraud and transaction costs. Validators on the platform will verify the provenance and authenticity of the items and for which they will be duly rewarded. Tracking the originality and authenticity and ownership of an item will be much simpler and transparent once it enters into the CODEX blockchain. The protocol works very efficiently to route out the fake items and frauds on the platform. Users on the platform can also avail loans on the assets acquired by them.

CODEX PROTOCOL: how the puzzle works!

First, we have to know that an ETH private key is created from 256 bits of secret information. So the solver is looking for 256 bits.

The second step is to calculate the first 256 values of the Fibonacci sequence. Calculation of whole numbers isn't trivial (numbers grow exponentially). But because we have to work with the only remainder (Sigma modulo 5), it eases up the calculation a lot.

Fibonacci sequence starts as follow: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...
But we work with remainders of the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 0, 3, 3, 1, 4, ...

According to hint, we start decoding from the top face, where the rope is attached from the ceiling.

In a dodecahedron, each face has five edges. So there are five possible directions to move from one face to neighbor faces. Each face has the Roman numeral 'I' which shows, how the edges are numbered in a clockwise direction (dextroversum). The edge with Roman numeral 'I' is numbered 1. The solver will derive how all edges of each face are numbered (from 0 to 4) while facing from outside.

Decoding loop (repeat 256 times):

Look for the direction to move from current face to another face:
Remainder value (on the same position of Fibonacci sequence) shows which neighbor face to visit in the next step.

pick one bit on the edge, which leads to neighbor face:
If the face's edge in that position is straight, it's 0. When it's slightly expanded, it's 1.

store picked a bit to the corresponding position in the private key:
On step 0, a picked bit is stored in zero position in binary format. On step 1, on second binary position etc. - from lowest bit to higher bits.

Move to neighbor face and repeat steps

These four steps are looped for 256 times and this way all 256 bits of the private key are collected (5a9674dbee5a9674dbee5a9674dbee5a9674dbee5a9674dbee5a9674dbfcf3ec).

Hints

There were two hints presented, each in the consecutive week after puzzle release.

The first hint

https://twitter.com/CodexProtocol/status/1003398236957302785
- CodexProtocol

was the same puzzle image, but with filled remaining empty columns. The left empty column featured a list of first few numbers of Fibonacci sequence in Roman numerals - that assured solvers which sequence was used (even they found out from mentioned original writings). The right empty column featured these values upon "Sigma modulo 5" operation. If solvers weren't able to find out for sure what sequence had to be used for decoding and how to mathematically process it, these two pieces information told them directly.

The second hint was helping to realize, the zigzag lines below the Codex logo were encoding a sentence written in Old Latin.

Each unique elevation of the line means one letter sorted as present in Old Latin alphabet (21 letters: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X). Three of the letters "AVE" been marked and soon the whole sentence was found out.

Youtube:

Token Info

Token: CODX - Codex Coin
Token Type: ERC-20
Token Price: US$ 0.067
Minimum Transaction: 0.05 ETH
Lockups: No Lock-up for Crowdsale
Size: US $5,000,000
Hard Cap: US $25,000,000
Soft Cap: US $15,000,000
Total Tokens: 1,000,000,000
Whitelist Dates: 2nd - 6th July 0800 UTC
Public Sale: End of July
Excluded countries: the US, China
Unsold Tokens: Kept for future sale