How the ledger works

Genesis Run is a first-person maze through twelve blocks of crypto history, from the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 to spot bitcoin ETFs in 2024. The maze and its rules live in one contract, Ledger.sol. The website is a way to walk it and to send your route to that contract.

Overview

• The board is 31 × 31 cells, 961 in total, fixed forever at deployment.
• There is exactly one route from the start cell (1,1) to the exit cell (29,29). It is 292 moves long.
• Twelve blocks sit on that route. You confirm them by stepping on them, in order.
• A run is the list of cells you crossed, one byte per step. Turning and looking cost nothing.
• The contract replays the run and records it only if every step is valid.

The maze

The grid was generated once with a seeded recursive backtracker (seed 713), which makes a perfect maze: every open cell is reachable and there is one path between any two of them. The contract stores the layout as four 256-bit words, one bit per cell, row by row. Cell c is at x = c % 31, y = c / 31. A copy is at maze.json with the start, exit, block cells and the shortest route.

Moves

The website appends a byte every time your position crosses into a new cell. A dead end costs two bytes per cell, one in and one out. The contract accepts at most 6,000 bytes.

Blocks

The walls between two blocks are painted in the era of the block ahead of you: the PDF, a newspaper and a block hash, pizza boxes, coins cut in half, exchange error screens, diamonds, a forked wall, cartoon cats, a yield farm, gallery frames, hazard tape and exchange-floor marble.

The contract

function verify(bytes moves) pure returns (
  bool ok, uint256 steps, uint256 cleared, uint256 at, string reason)

function submit(bytes moves)          // reverts with the reason if rejected
function best(address) view returns (uint32)
function record() view returns (uint32)
function recordHolder() view returns (address)
function finishes() view returns (uint32)
function lastRuns() view returns (Run[])   // newest first, up to 50
function stations() pure returns (uint16[12])
function isWall(uint256 cell) pure returns (bool)

verify is free to call. It walks the bytes from the start cell and stops at the first problem. submit runs the same walk and, if it is clean, updates your personal best, the record and its holder, the finish count, and emits Cleared(runner, moves, personalBest, newRecord).

No owner, no setter, no upgrade path, nothing to withdraw. A 292-move run costs about 395,000 gas on first submission. Source: contracts/Ledger.sol, ABI: contracts/Ledger.abi.json.

Status: not deployed yet. Until it is, the website answers Ask the chain with a local copy of the same rules and says so.

Rejects

Hall

The Hall reads lastRuns(), record() and finishes() from Robinhood Chain through the public RPC. Runs you finish on this device are also kept in your browser so you can verify or submit them later.

Token

$GENESIS is an ordinary Pons coin on Robinhood Chain (chain ID 4663). It has no rights over the maze, the contract or the record.

Sources

• Bitcoin whitepaper, 31 October 2008 · genesis block, 3 January 2009 · pizza purchase, 22 May 2010 · first halving at block 210,000, 28 November 2012.
• Mt. Gox bankruptcy filing, 28 February 2014 · Ethereum Frontier, 30 July 2015 · The DAO exploit, June 2016, and hard fork, July 2016.
• CryptoKitties congestion, December 2017 · COMP distribution and yield farming, June 2020 · Beeple sale at Christie's, 11 March 2021.
• FTX bankruptcy filing, 11 November 2022 · SEC approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, 10 January 2024.