This is a treasure chest: it contains the only copy of the private key to an ETH wallet, stamped into a sheet of metal. Over time, we will release clues about the location of this chest. Here is the first one: it's buried somewhere in the Texas Hill Country.

So what's in the wallet? To start, we've put a 1/1 NFT treasure inside, created by Cabin DAO collaborators @DugDaniels and @mel_being:

But what makes this treasure chest special is that, even though it's already buried, you can still add things into it. Think of it like contributing to a time capsule. Our hope is that one day in the future it will contain a gold mine of old NFTs and tokens and will lead to great adventures among treasure hunters.

Feel free to deposit anything you'd like into the treasure chest at this address:

0x9293db81d208814cB7F23F4DeDeEd0dBEc35D1A0

The treasure chest is also accessible at buriedtreasure.eth (the ENS domain is registered for the next 100 years; hopefully someone finds it by then).

To get the game kicked off, you can become a Treasure Hunter by collecting this NFT (also made by @DugDaniels and @mel_being):

Some clues will be released publicly. Others may be token-gated for Treasure Hunters. Proceeds from the sale of the Treasure Hunter NFTs will be split: 50% of the ETH will be deposited directly into the treasure chest, and the other 50% will go to Cabin DAO to support the Creator Cabins residency program & the artists that made this project possible.

Happy hunting!

FAQs

• Who knows where the treasure chest is buried?
  • Just me, Jonathan Hillis. I went to great lengths to leave no trace of where I buried it & I will tell no one where it is.
• How long will the treasure chest last?
  • Until someone finds it, the stamped metal plate corrodes, or ETH ceases to exist, whichever comes first.
• Why didn't you use a hardware wallet?
  • Common hardware wallets rely on a USB connection and additional layers of abstraction from the underlying wallet. The goal of this project was to make a treasure chest with the greatest chance of surviving for a very long time. Hardware wallets are great, but you can't beat keys stamped directly on metal for longevity.
• Why didn't you use a BIP-39 seed phrase as the password?
  • I wanted to rely on as few protocols as possible, provide the most direct and root-level access to the wallet, and avoid accidentally remembering words from the seed phrase. To accomplish this, I generated the ETH address and public/private keys using a random seed, stamped them into a piece of metal by hand, and saved no other records.
• Why did you register the buriedtreasure.eth domain and then assign control to the chest's wallet, instead of just having the chest's wallet register the ENS address directly?
  • To maintain a maniacal level of security. Registering the ENS domain directly using the wallet would have required using wallet software, a security risk I didn't want to take. This trades off slightly worse security for the ENS domain buriedtreasure.eth in order to maintain the strictest security for the underlying wallet: 0x9293db81d208814cB7F23F4DeDeEd0dBEc35D1A0. There is no possible way for anyone (including me!) to access the contents held at this address without finding the treasure chest.