As we all know, #Hashmasks have secrets hiding in the images.

What if I told you that you could've easily found all of the greatest secrets within 5 minutes?! And that these Hashmasks are currently super undervalued!! @TheHashmasks

Here's how:

Before I get into the details, I want to credit @philipplgh for the amazing work he's done for the #Hashmasks community.

We were looking into this at the same time and he published a similar investigation that I will be expanding on. https://twitter.com/philipplgh/status/1358117705958752256?s=20

@philipplgh found that the #Hashmasks with exceptionally rare traits had unique background fingerprints even if the background looked identical. https://twitter.com/philipplgh/status/1358117722253647876?s=20

@philipplgh came to two conclusions:

1. Steganography
2. The unique item covers the entire image. https://twitter.com/philipplgh/status/1358117731644690434?s=20

Steganography is where secrets are hidden within an ordinary image or file. The secret can be something like a private key, another image, or even an entire file.

These secrets can be hidden by changing the least significant bits of a pixel, by appending entire sets of data after the "end of file" marker, hiding text in the metadata, etc.

After a bit of steganographic searching, I didn't find any hidden messages. Probably to the disappointment of the many conspiracy theorists that we have in crypto.

What I did find though was more in line with @philipplgh's second conclusion. Basically, the presence of the rarest of the rare #Hashmasks traits changed the image entirely.

Let's compare two similar images:
1. Semi-rare bottle item (2.301%)
2. Super rare phoenix (0.226%)

If we analyze each image's data we see an obvious difference. The bottle #Hashmask has very little metadata while the phoenix #Hashmask has a ton!

What causes all of this extra metadata to be present?

The rarest #Hashmasks were all edited by hand! These super rare traits were added by the artists themselves using Adobe Photoshop.

But how does this explain the bit shift in the image pixels?

After the rare item was added to the image in Photoshop, the #Hashmasks were saved at a different quality than the original which slightly shifted the pixel bits. This gave the false indication of steganography.

With this knowledge, I was able to write a Python script that uses the Photoshop metadata to filter all the #Hashmasks and identify all of the ones with super rare traits within a couple of minutes.

Using this data, I've made a simple spreadsheet of the super rare #Hashmasks traits! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r0FxPrtRy7QSruLvlUzNdtcgcU6aN6vEy8HmjXn3qHE/edit?usp=sharing

Surprisingly, the Mystical character body is done by hand and is the only explicit trait created this way.

There are only 5 #Hashmasks with multiple super rare traits.

Only 1 Hashmask has 3 super rare traits, #9939 (mystical, unique mask, halo)

There are 37 phoenixes which come in all different shapes and sizes. There are only 2 super tiny phoenixes hiding! #5304 shown here is one, can you find the other?

This means that even the super rare traits can be split into even rarer sub-categories!!

There's only supposed to be 3 Pavamana Mantra Hashmasks, but @trentelme found an exact copy which my method also confirms! https://twitter.com/trentelme/status/1357763672832049153?s=20

Looking at this list, one thing stands out. None of the traits generally considered "rare" are present!!

The unicorns, golden robots, golden TP, books, shadow monkey, etc. traits were not created by hand. They were all autogenerated from a pre-selected probability.

One surprising omission from the super rare traits are the glyphs. Meaning that the Greek letters, astrology symbols, hieroglyphics, and planetary symbols were all randomly assigned too.

This is why some glyphs are completely obscured by the #Hashmasks background in some cases!

There's only one question that's been puzzling me... what's going on with #8808???

This is the only #Hashmask without a super rare trait that was edited in Photoshop and I can't find any reason why it was edited...

I even investigated the difference between #8808 and other similar #Hashmasks but couldn't find any glaring change. Here's the comparison with #12666. The only thing that sticks out is the line on the left side near the head...

Let me know if you find anything!

I have known all of this for a while now, but wanted to give @TheHashmasks a chance to tell it's amazing story before I spilled the beans. Their recent info releases have confirmed what I've just laid out for you. Read more about their journey here! https://thehashmasks.medium.com/masterpiece-decentralized-artistry-57a186d4e1c9

Thanks to everyone that I've chatted with over the last couple weeks including: @philipplgh @RJ_Kunz @randomwk0 @trentelme @robslasagna