Unsolved — prize unclaimed

The site is gone.
The prize is not.

GSMG.IO created a cryptographic Bitcoin puzzle with a 5 BTC prize — then the site went dark. The address never moved. This mirror keeps the puzzle alive.

↓ what happened ↓

What was GSMG.IO — and where did it go?

GSMG.IO was a platform that ran a series of Bitcoin-themed games and challenges. At some point they created what became known as the GSMG 5 BTC Puzzle: a multi-layer cryptographic challenge where the solution would reveal a private key to a Bitcoin address holding a real prize.

The site has since gone offline. No announcement, no explanation, no handover. The domain is dead. The social accounts went quiet. The team disappeared.

GSMG.IO

Offline

The original site no longer exists. All puzzle pages, images, and content that were hosted there are gone.

Prize Addresses

Funds Intact

Two Bitcoin addresses hold the prize — 1.25 BTC and 3.75 BTC. Neither has ever been swept. Both sit exactly where the puzzle creator left them.

This mirror exists to preserve what remains: the puzzle itself, the known clues, and the community knowledge that has accumulated around it. If someone is going to solve this, they need the pieces to still exist.

The prize

The prize is split across two addresses — 5 BTC total, all unspent. The decoded message deep in the puzzle reads "the private keys belong to half and better half": two keys, two addresses, two people. Both remain unclaimed.

5 BTC
Total unclaimed prize across two addresses
1.25 BTC 1GSMG1JC9wtdSwfwApgj2xcmJPAwx7prBe
3.75 BTC 17ucy1K9ZUAaoY6JVtM932W9jUp5LXfyHa
click an address to copy • verify on any block explorer

Both addresses can be verified independently on any Bitcoin block explorer. Neither has moved. No one has claimed either key. The puzzle is still open.

How the puzzle works

The GSMG puzzle is a multi-phase challenge. Each phase decodes into the next clue, and the final decoded output is supposed to reveal the private key that controls the prize address. The phases known to the community:

GSMG.IO 5 BTC Puzzle — the original rabbit grid image
The original puzzle image, archived from gsmg.io/puzzle
"The puzzle may be designed to lead you through layers of cryptography only to ask whether the prize was ever the point."

Separate branch — SalPhaseIon

Independent of the Phase 1–4 chain, the initial puzzle image contains text below a horizontal line. Taking the SHA-256 of that text produces a hash that is itself a valid gsmg.io URL — leading directly to the SalPhaseIon page, bypassing the intermediate phases entirely.

The SalPhaseIon page contains a dense a–i letter sequence with embedded plaintext fragments ("shabefour first hint is your last command", "shabefanstoo"), z/o separators, and two partial base64 blocks — plus a second section called Cosmic Duality with another AES-256-CBC ciphertext.

View the archived SalPhaseIon page →

Community chat

Active solvers working the puzzle in real time.

Telegram solver group

Community archives

Discussion history, hints, and solver attempts:

Alternate mirror

Another community-maintained copy of the puzzle:

pointerpee.gitlab.io

The official goodbye

On the day GSMG went dark, @sowut posted this farewell to the Telegram community. It’s reproduced here in full — it’s the only official record of what happened and why, and it deserves to stay readable.

Telegram @sowut

All Good Things Come To An End.

The End of GSMG — Our 9 Year Chaos Tour Is Officially Over, But the Stories Stay… Forever.

Hey legends.

After almost nine years of pure madness, caffeine overdoses and more red candles than any human should endure, it is time to turn the lights off. But before we do, grab a drink, get comfortable and let me tell you the whole stupid story straight from the idiots who lived it.

It all started in 2017. JRK was visiting Sydney with the better half. Instead of playing tourist like a normal person, he locked himself in a living room for nine straight days. Zero high-end programming skills. Just Siemens PLC code, some HTML, Quake 3 scripting and a bit of Pascal. He built the entire bot from scratch as one single terrifying, never-ending script. No functions. No classes. Just pure chaos and hope.

On June 10th at around 8:30 in the morning, the first order actually hit Poloniex servers. It somehow worked, albeit that the ATH of rising markets wasn’t overwritten, thus we started by selling for a loss. The very first name for this script was MR. ROIbot. And right there on that same day, d0d was already in the mix (he already knew infrastructure expert Darky, too). Greengras hooked us up with the very first server space, and the experienced algotrading coder Bloctite joined shortly after and basically saved our lives by rewriting the ENTIRE codebase (Python plus Cython, and currently basically bug-free). 1 idiot and 3 professionals with complementary skills, a host, and one big stupid dream. What could go wrong?

The reason it all started? JRK and d0d had just used another bot run by a scammer called fuzzyhobbit and thought nope. We are doing this the right way for everybody. That disrespect for the old banking system? Still burns to this day. And that is literally where Globally Supporting My Generation came from. An old friend’s group name was reused and suddenly became a mission. Give the power back to the little guy.

A little later, JRK got inspired by other crypto puzzles and spent two sloppy days throwing one together. Full of grammatical mistakes and zero polish. Sorry about the mental damage. That thing is still running, and we are keeping it alive. In 40 years, he might admit he forgot how to solve it himself. The torture continues. You are welcome.

The early days were absolutely mental. Within the first few days, we were already handling around 8 million dollars in value. The market analyser and trading engine we built back then were absolute beasts; they’ve been running nearly flawlessly ever since.

We wanted to offer a proper high-end portfolio management tool to the little guy at stupidly low prices. That was always the point. (And yes, now in 2026, AI can do the same thing in one shot if you’re a prompt genius with decent subscriptions and setups. Thanks for nothing, future.)

Here is the part nobody likes to say out loud. We never paid ourselves a single cent of salary in all these years. We had exactly one team dinner funded by GSMG. One. That is it. (Admittedly, it was a very nice dinner.) Every single subscription went straight into upgrades for Jeff Bezos’s wife’s latest mega yacht, and maybe even her youth.

We had some absolutely legendary moments together. Besides the community chat banter that still makes us cry laugh at 3 am. Boat rides with the first bunnies. Accidentally melting an exchange by ramping our API call limit parameter times one hundred (sorry again, lads).

Some of you lost money. We know the classic move. Coin moons → set the bot to 220% aggression at the top → coin dumps → blame the bot. Standard crypto rite of passage. But we also saw some of you catch beautiful flash crashes and turn minutes into multiple BTC. Those wins still make us giggle like little kids.

The ride was always about getting YOU rich. Hehe. We are not here for the money; we are here for the tech. Aren’t we all? We actually meant the first part.

So why are we stopping? To run a bot like this in 2026, you need a ridiculous amount of compute. Our market analyser is a proper cruncher which deals with big data, all on the fly. It crunches numbers every microsecond, year in year out. To stay competitive, it costs a fortune. The whole setup only really makes financial sense for the big whales and UHNWIs on the highest tier. Running these calculations for the shrimps is literally killing us financially. The other subscription levels are not enough to keep it +EV. We tried. We crunched the numbers until our eyes hurt. Time to be honest and do the inevitable.

We try to be a bit ghostly, but we are definitely not ghosting you. The dashboard stayed open for a few days for history retrieval. All funds from the last 6 weeks were returned. Your personal data was kept to bank security grade standards — it was deleted and was never included in any sale.

P.S. The puzzle is still unsolved. We are watching from the sidelines with an infinite amount of popcorn without giving any hints — we hope that this will remain community-maintained, as the URL might vanish. 👀

P.P.S. Don’t worry about us; we’ve been busy with many non-GSMG things in the meantime. Who knows, you might enjoy some of the services/products we worked on somewhere in your life. You may find us in digital delivery systems for the entertainment and racing industry, automobile global human transport services, educational platforms, card game, logistics, data analyses, music-related entertainment, and many more.

With love, zero regrets — JRK, d0d, Darky, Bloctite, and the remaining GSMG crew.

Why this mirror exists

When a site goes dark, puzzles die with it. Images get lost, clue pages become 404s, and years of community work become impossible to verify. That already happened with parts of the GSMG puzzle.

This mirror is maintained by btctired.com — someone who spent too many years in this space and has seen too many things disappear. The puzzle deserves to be solved, not forgotten because a domain lapsed.

If you have original puzzle assets, creator communications, or solved layers that aren’t publicly documented — share them in the Telegram solver group or contribute to either GitHub archive (puzzlehunt, naddiseo). Keep the record alive.

Nothing here is altered. This site does not claim ownership of the puzzle, the prize, or any intellectual property associated with GSMG.IO. This is a preservation mirror. If you solve it, the BTC goes to whoever cracks the key — not to whoever hosts the HTML.