The cryptocurrency space is the frontier of decentralized finance. It is also an extremely creative and inspired sphere of alternate realities and hopes for the future. If we look beyond the copycat NFT collectibles and increasingly commercial big-name tokens, there are many communities dedicated to mind-blowing original concepts. The Project 42 space is one of them that is bursting with crypto meaning.
Who is the Thought Kid?
My initial contact with Project 42 was completely unintentional. I was blankly scrolling on Instagram one day when I received a message from an unknown user, an innocuous middle-aged dude in an ugly sweater, who looked like nobody else on my friends list. Despite this person’s profile having all the hallmarks of a spam bot, the intriguing message captured my attention.
The IG message talked about the Thought Kid who had come from the year 2121. He was sent from the future by a multi-blockchain project, known as Project 42, to get people ready for the cryptocurrency disruption of the global financial system. The chosen few who were selected by the project received the message and a code name, and were instructed to follow the link on the user’s bio.
Clicking the link took me to a Discord chat room, where numerous people had followed the same private message on IG. Some had been there for many days already and there was a lively discussion on the purpose of the entire exercise. I began chatting with the other users and, out of the blue, I received an enigmatic message from the Discord bot. Another clue to the puzzle! I was hooked.
I began to investigate the links to the project. The fact that there were not many made it clear that the project was designed to be clandestine. First off, the official website. What seemed like a simple splash page was full of hidden intricacies. Stars appeared with the move of the mouse, and I inadvertently found a secret button that prompted me to enter my BSC wallet key.
This confirmed the cryptocurrency link, but I could find little else on the website, so off to IG I went. A look at the IG message sender’s profile yielded no useful information. However, I did find the Thought Kid’s official IG profile. The profile had no posts—it would not be that easy—but over 40 thousand followers. More importantly, there was an IG Stories post with what seemed like another cryptic clue.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I returned to the Discord server to follow up. Many people had already seen the IG Stories post and were trying to decipher its meaning. To their surprise, some of the prolific chat room sleuths had been promoted by the chat room bot to the role of ‘humans_detectives’. In addition, a dedicated channel for clues had been established to store any possibly useful information.
The leading discussion was the significance of the number 42. Aside from featuring in the project name itself, there was a message from the Thought Kid referring to ‘4 + 2’. A clear inference would be Douglas Adam’s sci-fi classic, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, where the meaning of everything, including life, is derived from the number 42. But would it be that straightforward? And what has that got to do with cryptocurrency?
Other users had the same questions. Together, we tried to connect the dots, reading up on everything from binary to Vedic mathematics and the Fibonacci sequence. It turns out that the number 42 has great significance across various cultures. We did a bunch of extrapolatory calculations and tested a few theories, but since there was no confirmation about our results, we had to keep an open mind.
Then we decided to butt our heads on another clue from the Thought Kid. Our collective code names. Research into the code name brought up, again, a whole range of seemingly unrelated information. There was European mythology, mRNA binding proteins that fought cancer, old school CompuServe sci-fi literature forums, and even an yeast genome. Possibilities abound!
The Clue Hunting Community
The Project 42 community has grown since I first joined the chat room. As we try to solve the mystery, some of us receive messages or ‘keys’ from the Discord bot as additional clues and an encouragement to keep asking questions. While I cannot say that we are any closer to a coherent conclusion, it is clear that the Thought Kid wants us to reassess our society and envision the prophetic promise of the future financial space.
Ultimately, the prospect of a final reveal is exciting, but the untangling process is just as fun. This is an experience much like a modern-day treasure hunt, where the community bands together to try to decipher the clues. An alternative, sci-fi version of The Da Vinci Code, if you will, with way more investigators. And we eagerly await more hints.
This, to me, is the beauty of the crypto space. It is not merely a cold hard exchange built for profit, but a visceral experience where players can be involved in creating and engaging an alternate reality for our world.