Smith, Lyle & Moore treasure hunts

Most bands buy ads. Smith, Lyle & Moore bought bitcoin. They hid the keys behind riddles on their own website and called it a treasure hunt. Then they did it again a year later.

Born to Be Wild, a trip to the moon

June 25, 2021. 0.025 BTC lands on a native SegWit address. The band's treasure hunt page doesn't show the address, though. It shows an xpub and promises the coins to whoever reaches the end of the journey first. The theme is Apollo 11. The first clue sits in the album cover of their Born to Be Wild.

The album cover keeps talking

The PNG ends. The file doesn't. The record ships the cover, so you can read the rest yourself:

tail -c 233 assets/smith-lyle-moore/born-to-be-wild/puzzle.png

You've found The Milky Way. Thanks for playing. 12 word key + Password. First word: fortune. Last stop, the moon. Your next stop is a secret museum. Enter through a hidden door. You'll need an 8-digit pin to gain admission, explorer.

So the shape is known from step one. Twelve words, one password, and the first word for free.

Gate after gate on the way up

The rest is a chain of password pages and key checks. The winners' write-up lists every one of them.

• The museum pin is the date of the moon landing, 07201969.
• The gold frames inside are the plaques of the first and last Apollo missions. Both end with "for all man kind". Three words.
• "One giant leap" would be perfect. Except leap isn't a BIP39 word. So it's one giant step.
• The museum burns down. One path is dated to the Apollo 1 fire and leads nowhere. The way back takes fffffffffff, then the same in capitals.
• The vault opens with 4samcodeartist. Samuel Morse was a painter too, the band explained later.
• The YouTube mix and an inverted upload cancel out. What's left is Morse: T+13STDALT. Thirteen seconds after touchdown, the alternative mix has a guitar. The guitar spells INTO DIGITAL.
• A page of ones and zeros reads "like an immortal, it never dies." That's tomorrow.
• An email to the band earns the gateway. The ticket in is the last stop of the journey, virtual moon.

And the wallet password? "The end of it all", plus a star. supernova.

Ever tried to hear Morse in a guitar solo? One commenter got into and gave up on the rest. Fair enough.

Check the twelve words yourself

npx @agntn/puzzles verify smith-lyle-moore/born-to-be-wild

OK. Drop the password and the same twelve words open another wallet, one that never saw a single transaction. That's why seed() takes a BIP39 passphrase as its third argument now.

Solved overnight, written up the same day

The coins left on August 18, 2021, at 07:33 UTC. That evening u/26-9-15-20 posted the full write-up: "we just solved the puzzle last night". The band answered under it with "Way to go you guys!!". Then they explained the frames, the giant step and the painter in their own words.

One thing nobody cracked. The page promised a shortcut, "the baby steps that lead to one giant leap". Asked about it, the band said nobody figured it out. "Prob will use a similar method to encode something into our next release."

Glimmer, a voyage across the sea

July 29, 2022. 0.031777 BTC, for the single Glimmer. Same trick as before: the flag on the treasure hunt page links an xpub on CoinTracker. Its first receiving address, native SegWit, holds the coins. The xpub also gives away the public key, so the record has one without a single spend.

This time it's a psychedelic journey across the sea. "The treasure is buried with riddles, cyphers, analogies and references to historical events or epic nautical stories." The key checker winks at returning players: "enter first word of key... just like last time ;)".

The shortcut sentence, copied word for word

The rainbow road paragraph is back on the Glimmer page. Same N64 shortcut, same "baby steps that lead to one giant leap". The band said it would encode something the same way in the next release. Was that a promise or a joke?

What's still open in Glimmer

Everything past the pages. The words, the password, the shortcut. The record keeps 7 hints, each from the band's pages with a Wayback capture beside it. As of October 2026, the 0.031777 BTC hasn't moved since it landed.

What the records carry

key: seed(
  "fortune all man kind one giant step into digital tomorrow virtual moon",
  "m/84'/0'/0'/0/0",
  "supernova",
).xpub("xpub6CdP…NvABg"),
stages: [/* the album cover, the museum, the vault, the gateway, the final attraction */],

Every stage carries its password as a published answer, quoted from the write-up. The cover is pinned by SHA-256, with the band's own URL and a 2021 Wayback capture that serve the same bytes. Glimmer keeps the xpub, the path and the pubkey. No words. Yet.

The Smith, Lyle & Moore puzzle records