The A858 project officially ended in late 2016. In a subsequent "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) and investigation, it was revealed that the account was likely part of a where a person was paid by an unnamed company to post these puzzles to generate interest or test encryption methods.
: Decoders found various pieces of content hidden in the hex, including C# scripts (like "PostAnalyzer"), GIFs with steganographic messages, and quotes from books.
: Users would scrape the hexadecimal strings from a specific post, convert them into a binary format, and then save them with a .rar or .zip extension.