This is the winner announcement of the first Crazy Cryptokas Riddle!
you can find the riddle
HERE


@misko was the first to complete all steps of the riddle and gave the correct answer. He will receive 7 STEEM for his perseverance.

The correct answer was:
Let's steem on

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Solution

In the first hint I gave you a letter grid that was not solvable without looking further in the riddle. The first clue to solve the grid was "Open the window to get a better view". The animated GIF further down in the post had the file name "window.gif". Inside the gif is a hidden frame that you had to lay over the letter grid to reveal the correct letters. With these letters you could make the word "bananas".


The animated GIF is also a clickable link which leads you to a password protected page: https://www.protectedtext.com/cryptokas . bananas was the correct password. Inside this page there is some encrypted text.

HTW IMGJYW MV HTW PWHHWJI ESPP UGSXW CMG HM A LPAYW ETWJW CMG TAFW ZWWB ZWVMJW. HTSI HSOW CMG TAFW HM LAC AB MJABUW HM WBHWJ.

The text was encrypted with a simple letter substitution. The second hint "The first letter of the alphabet is a gift!" made the decryption a little easier because the letter "A" was not substituted. The second hint gave you also a clue that the GIF was very important. A part of this hint has bold text (gif). The text after decryption gave you a final hint to solve the riddle:

THE SOURCE OF THE LETTERS WILL GUIDE YOU TO A PLACE WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN BEFORE. THIS TIME YOU HAVE TO PAY AN ORANGE TO ENTER.

The filename of the letter grid image is "qr_tsbrs.jpg" . This was the name of a second protected page with "orange" as password. https://www.protectedtext.com/qr_tsbrs

I hope you liked my riddle! See you in the next edition!