Yes, to place a work item on the list of available work list, the user who ordered the vanity address had to pay in Bitcoin upfront. The site calculated an amount based on the complexity of the vanity address (I don't know all the details, but I remember that I tried and played with the site back in late 2012 or so and I solved a not so hard work item and got paid for it when I submitted the split-key solution).

It wasn't very expensive in 2012, but we all know how the value of Bitcoin changed.

Every few months in the past years I was curious to see if anything changed with the last work items. For years almost nothing happened AFAIR. Out of nostalgia, I'm now a bit excited to read that someone actually tackled some of the last reasonably hard work items.

Congrats to @ddf2020 and chapeau! to @ThePiachu who kept the site alive, likely because some people paid good coins to enlist their vanity address work items for others to solve.

I'm wandering if the users who ordered their vanity address will appreciate the solution.