Our founder passed away. We shut down the game and returned investors 100% of their money.
In late 2019 a few of my favorite people in crypto came together to create a mysterious game around a treasure hunt for 1M$ of BTC. We worked with an amazing bunch of investors and advisors to make a set of extremely difficult puzzles which if solved would yield cryptographic key fragments that could be used to reconstitute the private key to an address holding the prize.
The game rapidly acquired a small but extremely engaged audience of hunters, who worked to solve the sometimes devilishly hard, sometimes just weird and fun, sometimes totally ridiculous clues that our team created. We had players (and also puzzle creators) all over the globe, and quickly became amazed at the difficulty we had in creating puzzles hard enough to keep hunters challenged.
The core person behind Satoshi’s Treasure was one of my closest friends, Adam Dupre, who was also one of the most talented designers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. He designed the visual language behind the game, the logo, and a huge number of the most well-received puzzles.
On March 02, 2020, Adam passed away, the victim of an intense depression that I saw come over him with terrifying suddenness. The last time I saw him he seemed deeply upset over some issues in his personal life, but he was also very excited about the game, and I told him he should stay in Boston with me until he was feeling better. I had lost a very close friend to depression in high school, and I thought I might have been being too sensitive about this, but in retrospect I wish more than anything else that I had been more aggressive about trying to get him to hang around instead of going back to New York.
Adam’s passing threw our team into disarray.After spending a lot of time seeing if we could continue the game without him, we decided to end it early, return all remaining funds to our investors, and wrap the game up. The hunters who had made the most progress were awarded smaller prizes to recognize their hard work in solving puzzles, and while there was inevitably drama about who should have gotten what, it felt like the right thing to do — to this day I remain amazed at the level of talent present in the people who played our game. I personally didn’t take any salary during the course of the game, because unlike the rest of the team I dedicated the majority of my time to my “real job” of advising a cryptocurrency fund. Since we held the company funds mostly in BTC, we were able to offer our investors 100% of their invested USD back, despite having paid 5 full-time salaries and various contracting expenses over the course of the game, and also giving smaller prizes to the teams who found the most keys in the course of the game.
I wish the game had been able to continue because I think it was a wonderful way to get people into crypto, and we had plans to use this type of skillful-puzzle game to help other cryptocurrency projects distribute their resources to people who were deeply engaged, but losing a founder is something that is extremely hard to get past for any early stage startup, and I’m grateful that BTC’s performance allowed us to at least make our investors whole in fiat terms despite the startup not being a win.
Adam’s work on the game remains some of the coolest visual design I’ve ever seen, crypto or not, and his work before the game is also among my favorite visual work out there. Losing a friend is always agonizing, but there’s something especially awful about losing an insanely talented friend — you can’t stop thinking about all the cool stuff they would have created if they hadn’t cut that short. In particular the current digital art/NFT movement would have been absolute catnip for Adam, and I think his work would have been widely valued and collected by people who feel the same way I do about his talent.
If anyone reading this is themselves interested in treasure hunts, or cryptographic puzzles, I’m always around to offer advice on the nuts and bolts of running a game like this. I’m also very grateful to the investors that gave us a shot at making something very different and magical, and to the folks that played our game from the beginning. And I’m hopeful that other games that come after this one will capture a lot of the excitement and magic that made the first few months of Satoshi’s Treasure such a unique moment in crypto.
RIP Adam Walter Dupré / @parc_ferme — 04/14/1986–02/02/2020
