🚀The Rocket Launcher:

The Rocket Launcher was pre-loaded with the code necessary to deploy the contract, mint the entire token supply and instantly stake the tokens to the contract. All of this would happen in a single transaction.

Nothing was done manually to mint the Lost Miners. Everything was engineered and developed to predict the timing of the merge and automatically fire the code using the Rocket Launcher.

The Rocket Launcher’s accuracy would determine our success or failure. There was no margin for error.

Spoiler alert. The Rocket Launcher worked flawlessly, and the rest is literally history.

That said, lets dig into this mission critical piece of software a little deeper.

The Rocket Launcher was an advanced contract deployment utility that constantly revised the merge block estimate based on persistent monitoring of mining activity and ongoing hash difficulty with a variety of trailing data based estimates to predict the merge timing.

The Rocket Launcher also monitored real time network activity and gas prices along with the current velocity of gas price fluctuations. This was necessary to estimate what the gas price would be in the future block the Rocket Launcher was targeting.

Based on our engineering team’s collective experience we set the Rocket Launcher to trigger exactly 3 blocks early. Said another way, the Rocket Launcher would fire 3 blocks ahead of the predicted block it was targeting.

As for which block to target, we anticipated what you may often hear referred to as a “miner bribe” being extremely likely in the last PoW block. While we make no attempt to judge or classify this type of behavior (that was much criticized during the PoW era) the simple fact is that we assumed this type of activity was virtually certain and that there would likely be multiple parties attempting this move.

What we didn’t know was what those parties might be trying to accomplish. Would they also have the foresight to create the final PoW collection? Would they be smart enough to mint and stake the full token supply while Ethereum was still under the PoW consensus mechanism? We had no way to know. This was one area where we could only cross our fingers and hope we had the better plan. When the dust settled, we were correct that the final block would have indeed been out of play for us, but we were ecstatic to see that it ended up only including a single (very expensive) mint of an NFT called “Vanity Blocks Token ID 17” on a previously deployed contract. The gas setting on the transaction was only 43 gwei but, there was also an internal transaction included to transfer 30+ ETH from the minting contract to the miner’s wallet. We will let history decide how it judges this transaction and that corresponding single NFT, but this 100% was NOT a newly deployed collection or token supply.

With the merge now in the rearview mirror The Lost Miner’s provenance as the indisputable final PoW collection was canonized. #theyexist