Ignas, a well-known DeFi researcher on Twitter, launched the "Seed Phrase sorting" experiment this week. He scrambled the multi-digit Seed Phrase of the wallet and made it public. As long as he can find the correct sorting, he can get the cryptocurrency in the wallet. However, This experiment doesn't seem so simple?
1/5 Experiment:
Guess the order of my seed phrases to get $200 USD.
I've created two wallets with ETH and Matic inside:
• $50 USD in Matic for a 12-word phrase
• $150 USD in ETH for a 24-word phraseHow long will it take you?
Seed phrases & addresses below 👇
— Ignas | DeFi Research (@DefiIgnas) April 19, 2023
Wallet Seed Phrase experiment: Is the wallet safe after disrupting the Seed Phrase?
Since Ignas is writing an article about keeping assets safe in the world of DeFi, I wanted to experiment with reordering the Seed Phrase to see if it is safe or not.
Ignas provided two wallets for this experiment:
- 12-word Seed Phrase with $50 Matic (42.5 Matic)
- 24-word Seed Phrase with $150 in ETH (0.07 ETH)
After mathematical calculation, a Seed Phrase composed of 12 words can produce 479,001,600 (12!) permutations and combinations, and a mnemonic composed of 24 words can produce about 6.2e+23 (24!) permutations and combinations.
From the combinations that can be produced, we can know how different the difficulty of cracking the two wallets is. After Ignas started this experiment, the first wallet was cracked in about an hour. However, the Seed Phrase composed of 24 words The wallet has been fairly safe for about 2 days since its inception.
The difficulty has been reduced, but no one has cracked it yet
The experiment is still in progress, but the difficulty of 24! permutations and combinations is too high. Many people asked to increase the bonus to increase participation motivation, and Ignas provided the first three correct words to reduce the difficulty.
In addition, some participants reported that they inadvertently cracked other wallets during the experiment, but the correct wallet has not yet been cracked. Interested readers can also try it.
