1. You choose the horizon — 2, 5, or 10 years. Your treasure unlocks on that date, counted from the day you carve it.
Buried Treasure
We don’t have the key. Nobody does — until the math says yes.
Carve a treasure →Humans have always wanted to mark presence in a way the future couldn’t edit. Cave paintings only survived because the caves sealed themselves. The Sistine Chapel needs restoration every century. Tombstones weather. Tattoos fade and age with the skin. Padlocks on bridges fall into the river when the bridge collapses under the weight of all the other padlocks.
Every previous medium for “I was here, this happened, remember” carries the same fatal trade-off: it decays, it costs upkeep, or both. Buried Treasure puts the mark somewhere none of those things touch — a time-locked vault that opens by mathematics, not by anyone’s hand.
The fixed horizon — 2, 5, or 10 years, your choice — isn’t a limitation, it’s the feature. A horizon you set, then no one can touch, makes today and the unlock date feel like different worlds. It’s the right shape for the things worth carving and waiting on: the seed phrase your kid will need at 25, the prediction you’re staking your reputation on, the evidence you want public after you’re gone, the letter to be read on a future anniversary of the day you wrote it.
1. You choose the horizon — 2, 5, or 10 years. Your treasure unlocks on that date, counted from the day you carve it.
2. Write your secret in your browser — a hardware-wallet seed phrase, the location of a buried asset, a years-out prediction, a piece of evidence, anything that benefits from a long, fixed delay.
3. Your browser encrypts the secret using drand timelock — identity-based cryptography on BLS12-381, anchored to a public randomness beacon run by Cloudflare, Protocol Labs, EPFL, and others.
4. The ciphertext gets carved into The Tower with a Bitcoin anchor on today’s block — proof you sealed it now, not later.
5. You download a small archive: the ciphertext plus a self-contained verifier — everything needed to decrypt independently when the time comes. No key to lose, because there is no key to hold. Save the archive, print it, hand it to your lawyer, whatever feels right.
6. On your chosen date — not before, not by anyone’s choice — the drand network publishes the signature that unlocks your entry. Anyone holding the ciphertext can now decrypt it — including you, with the standalone verifier in your archive. (Tower does not notify you when the round arrives; the archive you saved on day one is what makes the moment self-serve.)
Every existing time-release service has a custodian. A company holding a key. A vault that opens because someone clicks a button. The custodian can be subpoenaed, breached, acquired, dissolved, lobotomized by new policy. The key escrow becomes the weakest link.
Drand timelock is different. The decryption key is a BLS signature that doesn’t exist yet. Producing it before its time requires breaking the consensus of a federation of independent nodes (Cloudflare, Protocol Labs, EPFL, U-Chile, others) before their threshold protocol releases that round’s signature publicly. Until then, no entity — not Tower, not the drand operators acting alone, not a court order, not a quantum computer that doesn’t exist — can produce the key.
When the round arrives, the signature is published publicly. Anyone holding your ciphertext can decrypt — you, with the standalone verifier in the archive you saved on day one. If Tower is gone by then — doesn’t matter. The math doesn’t need us.
Two reasons a person locks something years away — the rational and the human. Both need the same thing: a box no one can open early, and no one can fake the date on.
The rational stakes
The seed phrase your family can’t lose. A hardware wallet, a paper backup, a spouse who has never touched crypto — and you, gone in seven years. Seal the seed phrase now and the network releases the key on the date you set, whether or not anyone remembers where you stored the archive. No custodian, no exchange, no trust beyond the math doing what it said it would.
The disclosure on a decade timer. Evidence that becomes public in ten years — no sooner, no matter who leans on whom. Tower can be compelled to hand over the ciphertext, but we don’t hold the key and can’t produce one before the round arrives. The plane lands, the source is long gone, the math doesn’t care — it opens on the date it always would have.
The call you’re making for 2036. A market move, a technology, a political reality, a scientific outcome — a decade-out prediction you want on record before it’s obvious. A screenshot can be faked; a Tower carve is dated, anchored to Bitcoin, and unsealed by math on the ten-year mark. Plant the flag now; let time deliver the receipt.
The long bet. A wager — with someone, or with the person you’ll be in ten years — settled by what’s actually true when the decade closes. Carve the terms today; no one can edit them later, and no one can peek before they’re due.
The unfakeable mark
A letter to who you’ll be in ten years. What you believe right now, what you’re afraid of, what you swore you’d have done by then. Sealed today, openable only when a decade has actually passed — so the you who reads it can’t have skipped ahead or quietly edited the past.
The words for when you’re gone. Carve them at seventy; your family opens them at eighty, from the archive you handed them. Tony ❤ Jodie on the overpass gets painted over. Brooks’s name in the halfway-house beam gets demolished. Bitcoin outlasts the tree, the overpass, the love-lock cut off the bridge for scrap — and delivers what the body couldn’t stay around to say.
An heirloom chained to math. Hand your kid an engraved object today — a coin, a plate, a ring. She opens nothing yet. Ten years on, the math unseals what the engraving points to: a message, a key, a story you wanted her to have at the right age and not a day before. Lose the object, Tower still holds the record; lose the record, the object means nothing; hold both, you hold the temple.
The wedding day that opens on the tenth anniversary. Vows, a private message, the reasoning behind the leap — carved on the day, unsealed by math on the date exactly a decade on. The archive you both saved is what opens it; the network publishes the key on the anniversary you already know by heart.
Compare $100 for years of unfakeable math to what people already spend trying to mark permanence:
A $5 padlock on the Pont des Arts. Paris cut forty tonnes of love-locks off the bridge in 2015 after the railings buckled. The locks were sold as scrap.
$40 of funeral flowers. Wilted in a week. Composted in a month.
An $8 Hallmark card. Read once, drawered, landfill within a year.
A $500 tattoo. Hurts. Ages with your skin. Gone when you are.
$100 in The Tower. Time-locked. Anchored to Bitcoin. Math holds the mark instead of your body, your bridge, your florist, or your card company holding it.
Buried Treasure — a flat $100 per entry, whether you seal it for 2, 5, or 10 years. One price.
One-time charge at carve. No recurring fees. The ciphertext is replicated to permanent decentralized storage; The Tower’s longevity is not a precondition for your entry surviving or unlocking.
Drand network dependency. If the drand federation halts permanently, your ciphertext stays locked. The federation has run continuously since 2018 with no halts. Mitigation we’re building: encrypt to two beacons (drand quicknet + a secondary), unlockable by either.
Lose the ciphertext, lose access. The drand round only releases the key. The ciphertext itself is yours to keep. Download it at carve time. Print it. Treat it like the deed to a vault — because that’s exactly what it is.
Quantum risk. BLS12-381 (drand’s curve) is theoretically breakable by a large enough quantum computer. The vault wraps your key with ML-KEM-768, a post-quantum standard, so the decryption secret stays protected even against a future quantum adversary.
Once locked, locked. There’s no “cancel” or “reschedule.” The whole point is that no one — you included — can open it early. Two, five, or ten years is a long time. Carve carefully.