In a fascinating and somewhat controversial development, it has been revealed that the NIST elliptic curves, upon which much of modern cryptography relies, were generated in the late ’90s using seeds provided by the NSA. The seeds themselves are rumored to be hashes of English sentences, but the individual responsible for selecting them, Dr. Jerry Solinas, sadly passed away in early 2023, leaving behind a cryptographic mystery. To add further intrigue, there is currently a $12K prize available for anyone who can successfully recover the hash seeds. It is worth noting that this is not related to the constants used in the Dual_EC_PRNG random-number generator that the NSA backdoored.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/10/bounty-to-recover-nists-elliptic-curve-seeds.html