SPOTLIGHT: JTobcat AKA 'Builder and Destroyer of Puzzles' Solved Yuga Labs' 1st Twelvefold Puzzle

On Tuesday, JTobcat who describes himself as the ‘Builder and Destroyer of Puzzles,’ quickly deciphered Yuga Labs’ first Twelvefold blockchain brain teaser and won .12 BTC!

Things were anything but boring this morning after Yuga Labs posted its first Twelvefold inspired puzzle and announced its plans to release a new puzzle every Tuesday between now and November 28, 2023!

"In February we launched Twelvefold, 300 unique generative art pieces on the Bitcoin blockchain,” Yuga Labs tweeted. “Today, we launch a cipher puzzle series inspired by the art, at https://twelvefold.io/puzzle. Yes, there are prizes…and you currently don’t need to own a TwelveFold to participate.”

Following Yuga Labs’ tweet, JTobcat got to work on the puzzle and solved it in a matter of minutes. But it took him an hour to set up the necessary wallets and submit his answer.

“I’m obviously very excited to find out I was first, especially since I saw there were multiple inscriptions before mine,” JTobcat told the Gazette. “I wasn't even keeping an eye out for the email as I was positive I was out of the running. his first puzzle took me about 10 minutes to solve, but then almost another 60 minutes until I was able to get an ordinal wallet setup, find some btc, wait for blocks to get mined and get the inscription minted with the solution. It is neat to have a "proof of solve" that is public on the blockchain to determine the winner with the answers being pgp encrypted for everyone to see.”

JTobcat credits today’s victory to his interest in the Twelvefold collection since March, 2023, his affinity for puzzles, and his ability to spot details.

“Having looked at all 300 Twelvefolds closely back when they were released, both because I thought they were neat pieces of art and looking for any possible secret puzzle in them, I was familiar with how most should look, so it instantly jumped out that it was two Twelvefolds merged together,” he explained when asked how he solved today’s puzzle so fast. “This was validated by the text in the puzzle saying "having two together" meaning two were merged, and then saying "make all the difference" hinted to find the difference between each pair. So after finding all 6 pairs and taking the difference between the numbered edition of each gave 10-9-7-19-1-23, that when converted with the a1z26 cipher, gave the final answer of JIGSAW.”

For those who plan to participate in Yuga Labs’ next 12 Twelvefold puzzles, JTobcat recommends that players set up their Bitcoin wallets now and also review Yuga Labs’ past puzzles and understand how others got the answers!

“For people joining, I'd recommend getting familiar with a browser wallet that supports ordinals and having some bitcoin ready to pay some inscription fees (~15k sats per inscription),” he said. “On the puzzle side, being able to solve puzzle 1 and understand it yourself is good practice along with going through and reviewing old ape puzzles to get a feel for what to expect as these seem very similar in style.”

The Bored Ape Gazette will continue to follow Yuga Labs’ Twelvefold puzzles and will bring you a full report on each week’s winner. Stay tuned for updates!