A Genesis Block Bitcoin puzzle surfaced on 22 August when an anonymous actor embedded a 255-byte message inside block 963,629, claiming to have generated a wallet private key entirely from publicly available Genesis Block data. Galaxy Research identified the transaction the following day; neither the author’s identity nor the derivation method has been verified.
CryptoRank notes that Foundry USA, one of the largest operational mining pools in the world, mined block 963,629 at approximately 19:45 UTC. The block is permanently confirmed in Bitcoin’s transaction history.
What the Genesis Block Bitcoin Puzzle Actually Claims
The on-chain message was placed in an OP_RETURN output, making it a provably unspendable but permanently readable payload. The author wrote: ‘I created a Bitcoin puzzle using information contained in the Genesis Block created by Satoshi to generate the wallet.’ The creator described the wallet’s entropy as ‘extremely low’ and stated that ‘everything I needed was already in the Genesis Block,’ rendering a private backup unnecessary.
These are unverified claims from an anonymous source. Entropy, in key-generation terms, refers to the randomness of the input pool. A wallet derived from known public data becomes vulnerable the moment an attacker can reproduce the exact selection, ordering, and transformation the creator applied.
The Genesis Block, mined on 3 January 2009, offers several candidate inputs: its hash (000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f), timestamp (1231006505), nonce (2083236893), Merkle root, public key, and the embedded headline ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.’ Blockstream‘s technical reference confirms those field values. Any combination could form part of the key-generation logic; solvers still need to identify which values the creator selected and how they were processed.
According to BigGo Finance, the puzzle wallet is protected by two multisig keys, meaning a solver must determine both the specific Genesis Block data used and the derivation method, neither of which the on-chain message discloses. That two-layer requirement raises the practical difficulty considerably beyond what a naive brute-force over known Genesis Block fields would suggest.
The puzzle should not be confused with the Genesis Block’s original 50 BTC coinbase subsidy. Those coins are unspendable: the original Bitcoin implementation did not add that coinbase transaction to the spendable output set.
OP_RETURN as a Publication Mechanism
The transaction weighed 500 bytes and paid a miner fee of 250 satoshis, a rate of 0.60 satoshis per virtual byte. The 255-byte payload accounted for more than half the raw transaction size, which is why Galaxy Research characterised it as an ‘oversized OP_RETURN.’ The label refers to its unusual payload size relative to ordinary data outputs, not a violation of Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
Galaxy Research’s own report on Bitcoin on-chain fees placed the Genesis Block Bitcoin puzzle in a broader context: as of August 2025, OP_RETURN transactions accounted for approximately 20% of daily Bitcoin transactions, down from a peak of 40–60% during the height of Runes adoption in Q2–Q3 2024. Median daily fees had dropped more than 80% since April 2024. At 0.60 satoshis per virtual byte, publishing the puzzle cost next to nothing.
Galaxy Research has direct experience with the mechanism. The firm previously used an OP_RETURN output to broadcast a historic sale of 80,000 BTC for a client, which explains its familiarity with characterising non-standard payloads.
KuCoin frames the puzzle’s construction as a deliberate move away from randomly generated seed phrases toward deterministic keys derived from known, fixed public data. The practical difficulty of solving it, however, remains unclear given the undisclosed derivation method.
What Would Constitute a Verified Solution
Embedding a claim on-chain proves the message existed at that block height. It does not verify that the statements inside it are accurate. No outgoing transaction signed by the puzzle wallet’s private key had appeared at publication time, and Galaxy Research had not identified the author or a verified solution when it disclosed the transaction.
An apparent solution could also originate from the creator rather than an independent solver, so a spend alone would not confirm that the derivation method had been independently cracked. Until a valid spend or signed proof appears, this remains an unresolved Bitcoin puzzle built around Genesis Block public data: a low-cost on-chain challenge whose answer is locked behind an unpublished transformation.
