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  • Digital Treasure Hunt Platform ‘Project Uanon’ Launches On Tezos With $100k In Prizes

Digital Treasure Hunt Platform ‘Project Uanon’ Launches On Tezos With $100k In Prizes

Project Uanon Genre

So, what exactly is Project Uanon? Well, if you want to get a feel for what the genre of the game is, it would be best to take a quick peek at Cicada 3301. This was one of the first of this type that got a lot of attention. On January 4th, 2012 a user on 4chan posted an image that turned out to include a hidden message.

This turned out to be a series of puzzles that was repeated for three consecutive years and ended each year with 10 physical clues that were left on separate locations spread out across the world.

It has been called:

“the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the internet age” and is listed as one of the “top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the internet”, and much speculation exists as to its function.” – Wikipedia 

Check out this youtube video that gives a pretty good overview of the series of puzzles that were included in the game. It also speculates about the purpose of the game as a sort of recruitment technique for a secret organization. As you can imagine, this was a great catalyst for the emergence of a new genre.

In this genre, Bitcoin currently has “Bulltardia” (This game just ended yesterday, since someone solved it) and Ethereum will have “Age of Rust” soon. One hour after the moment this article is published, Tezos will have Project Uanon. Users can play in teams, and there will be both individual prizes, and team prizes to be won. Total available prizes are $100K in XTZ.

Chain of Insight

Chain of Insight have been dropping crypto puzzles on Tezos for over a year now. Some examples are the ‘Edo Mining Challenge’ and the ‘The Oracle of Delphi’ puzzle. To get an idea of what these puzzles take to solve, take a look at the explanation of how the ‘The Oracle of Delphi’ puzzle was solved here.

Uanon

Project Uanon is a dystopian cyber adventure puzzle set in the near future. Players proceed through 6 stages of the game world, called “seasons”, competing for seasonal prizes, and an overall prize awarded to the first player to correctly solve all 6 seasons.

Seasons are launched on a monthly basis for 6 months. Once distributed, they can be solved in any order. In this game world, mainstream media is rarely trusted, and conspiracy theories abound. Certifiable truth comes at premium value, disseminated in the form of a cryptocurrency token called ‘Truth Shards’.

To receive Truth Shards players cryptographically verify circumspect information using the PoP Machine Glow (PoPMG) interactive proofs solver. This smart contract distributes the Truth Shards, which are Tezos NFT tokens according to the FA2 standard. Proofs verified by this oracle also provide a real-time leaderboard of player rankings within the Project Uanon Dapp.

Once all seasonal shards have been collected, they can be assembled to forge the endgame NFT, known as the Bigger Picture token, in a transaction that unlocks the final prize.

Gameplay

Gameplay takes place on the website where storytelling and puzzle delivery occurs in a variety of 2-Dimensional and 3-Dimensional scenes that emulate modern technology; some of which mirror the style of “Q Drops” which helped popularize the cultural phenomenon QAnon.

Project Uanon’s players are sorted into three teams called “Nation”, “Rebel” and “Unknown”. These team designations mirror the Republican, Democrat, and centrist spectrums of American politics. Throughout the game players and teams must solve multiple series of puzzles of increasing difficulty, to compete for a piece of the total 100k USD prizes.

Prizes are claimed in Tezos XTZ by submitting zero-knowledge puzzle proofs to the Uanon smart contract using the Project Uanon Dapp. Game prizes include, but may not be limited to, 5 seasonal prizes worth 10k USD (awarded to individual players), 1 grand prize of ~40k (awarded to the overall winner), and 1 community prize valued at ~10k (awarded to all members of the winning team minus the overall winner).

All prize claims and ‘Truth Shard’ minting is fully integrated into the play experience and triggered by solving special “end of season”, or “end of game” puzzles, called Ascensions.