S1mple Net Worth 2026: Inside the $9M CS2 GOAT Fortune

Last updated: November 5, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

S1mple’s net worth is estimated at $9 million in 2026, inside a $6–12 million range. That is the anchor this article settles on after weighing every published estimate against the money that can actually be documented: $1,725,255 in tournament prize money across 155 events, roughly nine years of top-tier salary at Natus Vincere, and a BC.Game contract that became one of the most argued-about pay packets in esports. The range is wide because the contracts are private. The anchor sits where the two most careful 2026 estimates meet — win.gg’s $8–9 million, published in March 2026, at the centre of the $6–12 million band modelled by About Game World in June 2026.

Three money stories explain the fortune. First, the salary: around $50,000 a month at NAVI for the best part of a decade, which multiplies out to roughly $5–6 million before tax — more than three times his entire prize-money haul. Second, the contract saga: a caster claimed he asked BC.Game for $120,000 a month, s1mple answered on Telegram that $120,000 “isn’t enough”, and then in April 2026 he said the real number was not even half that. Third, the 2026 season itself: BC.Game missed the first CS2 Major of the year, finished fourth at DraculaN Season 7 in October, and by March s1mple had logged more Dota 2 matches than CS2 games on FACEIT.

This article does what the thin net worth pages do not. It prints every source’s number with its date, shows why the $2.5 million figure still floating around is too low, lays out the prize money year by year, runs the salary-versus-prize-money maths with the workings labelled, and puts s1mple next to ZywOo, dev1ce and NiKo so the reader can see where the CS2 GOAT actually stands. Every figure is either documented or labelled an estimate. Nothing here is invented.

The Short Answer: Million Inside a –12 Million Range

S1mple is worth an estimated $9 million in 2026, inside a $6–12 million range. The anchor is not a guess dressed up as precision. It is the midpoint of the two most careful estimates published this year: win.gg put him at $8–9 million in March 2026, and the About Game World model carried by UK Gaming News in June 2026 put him at $6–12 million. StreamScheme, updated in January 2026, landed on the same $6–12 million band. Three independent trackers, two of them arriving at the same range by different routes, and the third sitting dead centre in it — that is as solid as an esports net worth estimate gets.

The number is big for a player whose documented prize money is $1.7 million, and the gap is the whole story of this article. Prize money is the smallest of s1mple’s income streams. Salary is the largest by a distance. A player who earned ~$50,000 a month for nine years at NAVI took home roughly $5–6 million in salary alone, before tax, before bonuses, before a single sticker or sponsor. Add the BC.Game years, the brand deals, and the streaming audience, and $9 million stops looking generous. It looks like the middle of the road.

The honest caveat, printed here because every serious tracker prints it too: salaries in Counter-Strike are private contracts, brand deal values are never disclosed, and nobody outside s1mple’s own circle has seen his bank statements. The $6–12 million range reflects that uncertainty honestly. The $9 million anchor is where the evidence points.

The Adjudication Table: What Every Source Says, and Why They Differ

Net worth pages disagree about s1mple because they count different things. Some count prize money only. Some add salary. Some add sponsorships they cannot price. The table below lines up every major 2026 estimate with its date and its method, so the reader can see which ones are doing real work and which ones are repeating an old number.

The $2.5 million figure deserves a closer look, because it is the number a careless search still surfaces first. Surprise Sports updated the page on October 10, 2026 — but the body of the article still says “as of 2024, s1mple continues to compete… representing Team Falcons on loan from Natus Vincere.” That was true in early 2024. It has not been true since. He left NAVI permanently in July 2025 and signed for BC.Game the same day. A page that describes a two-year-old loan as current has not rebuilt its estimate for the BC.Game era, and its $2.5 million counts little beyond prize money: $1.7 million in prizes plus a thin slice of salary gets you to $2.5 million only if you ignore nine years of $50,000-a-month pay. The figure is not a competing estimate. It is an unfinished one.

The older pages are worse. Get On Stream, last updated in 2022, prints $1.1 million — a number that was already out of date when it was published, because by then s1mple had six years of NAVI salary behind him. iWealthyFox (2023) prints $1–5 million. ProGamersAge (March 2022) prints $1–4 million. These are not estimates of his 2026 wealth. They are snapshots of a much younger career, and they survive in search results because nobody took them down.

That leaves the 2026 estimates, and they agree more than they disagree. The floor is $6 million, the ceiling is $12 million, and the centre is $8–9 million. This article anchors at $9 million: the top of win.gg’s band, the centre of the wider range, and the figure the evidence supports once the salary maths is done properly.

Prize Money: style=”border-bottom:3px solid #c9a227;padding-bottom:8px;color:#1a1a2e;”,725,255 Across 155 Tournaments

The one number in s1mple’s finances that nobody has to estimate is the prize money. Esports Earnings, the database the whole scene uses, records $1,725,255 from 155 tournaments as of March 2026. That is a documented fact, not a model. It is also, by itself, a misleading number — because tournament winnings are split with the team and the organisation, taxed in whatever country they were won, and spread across thirteen years. The gross figure is $1.7 million. What s1mple kept is less. Win.gg estimates he took home around $1.4 million of it after tax, a reasonable haircut for winnings earned across dozens of jurisdictions.

The year-by-year table shows where the money actually came from. One year — 2021 — accounts for nearly half of it.

Read the table as a career in miniature. The money follows the trophies: $799,414 in 2021, the Major year, dwarfs every other season. The three years after the break — 2024, 2025 and 2026 — add up to $6,900 between them, less than he won in a single month of 2021. That collapse is the financial shape of the BC.Game chapter: the salary may still be large, but the prize money has dried up because the team is not winning tier-one events. One more note on the totals: Ensigame lists a higher career figure, $1,875,246, because it counts events differently. This article uses the Esports Earnings number as its primary figure and names the gap, rather than quietly picking the bigger one.

The NAVI Salary: ~,000 a Month for Nine Years

Salary, not prizes, built s1mple’s fortune. Multiple industry sources put his Natus Vincere pay at around $50,000 a month, and win.gg and UK Gaming News both carry the figure. He was on NAVI’s books from August 2016 until his release in July 2025 — nine years, most of them as the best player on the planet and the face of the organisation. Multiply $50,000 a month across nine years and the gross comes to roughly $5.4 million. UK Gaming News models it as $5–6 million, allowing for the fact that his pay rose as his status did: he did not walk into NAVI in 2016 on a superstar contract, and he did not leave in 2025 on a rookie one.

The maths is illustrative — the contract was never published, and the $50,000 figure is a reported estimate, not a payslip. But the shape of it is hard to argue with. Even if the true average were $40,000 a month, nine years still produces $4.3 million. Even at $30,000 it produces $3.2 million. Any plausible version of the NAVI salary dwarfs the $1.7 million in prize money, and that is why every serious 2026 estimate lands at $6 million or above while the prize-money-only pages stall at $2.5 million. They are counting the wrong stream.

There is a second reason the salary matters more than the prizes: it was guaranteed. Prize money depends on winning. Salary arrives whether the team lifts the trophy or goes out in the groups. Through the thin years — 2017, 2019, the pandemic season of 2020 — the NAVI contract kept paying while the prize cheques shrank. That steadiness is what turns a good player into a wealthy one, and it is the part of esports economics that casual net worth pages almost always miss.

The BC.Game Contract Saga: 0,000 a Month — or Under ,000?

No part of s1mple’s money story got more attention in 2026 than the BC.Game salary, and no part of it is less settled. The story began in March 2026, when Belarusian caster Konstantin “Leniniw” Sivko said on a podcast and on Telegram that s1mple had asked BC.Game for $120,000 a month when negotiating his move, aiming to become the highest-paid Counter-Strike player in history. Win.gg carried the claim on March 17, 2026, and noted that a Players.com.ua article six months earlier had put the figure near $130,000. Leniniw himself admitted some of the information came second-hand — “someone who knows well-informed people”, in his own words — and neither BC.Game nor s1mple has ever confirmed a contract figure.

S1mple’s own response made the story stranger. He replied on Telegram: “120 isn’t enough, half of the players in the Tier 1 scene already have that kind of salary. I asked for a little more.” Read straight, that sounds like a man confirming he earns more than $120,000 a month. Read as the joke it probably was, it confirms nothing at all — and s1mple has a long habit of winding up the scene on Telegram. Then came the correction. In April 2026, addressing a circulating report that his monthly salary had reached $120,000, s1mple said the figure was “not even half” of that amount — putting his actual pay under $60,000 a month, according to Escorenews and UK Gaming News. That is the only statement in this whole saga that comes from the player himself about his own pay, and it points the other way from the rumour: under $60,000, not over $120,000.

Dot Esports added a third version in August 2026, reporting rumours of a $500,000 transfer fee paid to NAVI alongside a $130,000 monthly salary, on a contract running to late 2025 — which, if accurate, would make the deal one of the most expensive player acquisitions in Counter-Strike history. The report itself stressed that no official confirmation had surfaced. This article treats all three numbers the same way: the $120,000 ask is a caster’s claim, the $130,000 salary is an unconfirmed rumour, and the under-$60,000 figure is s1mple’s own word. The honest summary is that his BC.Game pay is probably strong but not record-breaking, and that the $120,000 figure says more about his market value than his bank balance.

For the net worth maths, the distinction matters less than it looks. Even at $60,000 a month, a year at BC.Game adds $720,000 in salary. At $120,000 it adds $1.44 million. Either way, the BC.Game chapter is a fraction of the nine NAVI years that came before it — and either way, it sits comfortably inside the $6–12 million range this article anchors on.

2026 in Review: BC.Game, Missed Majors, and the Dota 2 Detour

The 2026 season has been a hard one to watch for anyone who remembers s1mple at his peak, and the results explain why the prize money column for this year reads $2,000. BC.Game started the year by acquiring the core of SAW for a reported $2.5 million, according to journalist OverDrive — a serious investment in a roster built around the greatest player the game has seen. The results did not follow. The team went out in the group stage at IEM Kraków in February 2026, finishing 13th–16th for $2,000, and again at PGL Bucharest in April.

The low point came in March. BC.Game withdrew from ROG JOURNEY Spring, the last LAN event before the invite deadline for the IEM Cologne Major 2026, and with the team ranked 41st in the Valve Rating System the withdrawal ended any remaining path to qualification. S1mple missed the first CS2 Major of 2026. A BC.Game representative told HLTV the team had withdrawn because “our current results are not good enough” — strong in practice, losing games they should not be losing. The team still had PGL Bucharest in April and IEM Atlanta in May on the schedule, but neither event counted toward Major qualification. The Major that did take place in Cologne in June 2026 — June 8 to 21 — went ahead without him, and his only presence at the venue was symbolic: his falling AWP no-scope against Team Liquid at ESL One Cologne 2016, one of the most famous plays in Counter-Strike history, was commemorated in stained glass at the arena.

October brought no turnaround. At DraculaN Season 7, BC.Game finished fourth after a 2–0 loss to JiJieHao in the lower bracket final on October 22, 2026 — Dust2 13–5, Ancient 16–14 in overtime — with s1mple posting a 0.79 rating across the two maps, last on his team. The HLTV ranking told the same story: 67th in the world when BC.Game signed him in July 2025, in the 90th-range by April 2026. And then there was the detail that said more than any result: since January 2, 2026, s1mple had played more than 37 Dota 2 matches on his Dotabuff profile against only 30 CS2 matches on FACEIT, with a 46% Dota win rate. The greatest Counter-Strike player alive was spending more of 2026 playing a different game.

None of this dents the net worth. The fortune was built between 2016 and 2023, and a lean 2026 costs him prize money he was never going to earn at a tier-two team anyway. What it does change is the trajectory: the BC.Game years are not adding to the fortune at the NAVI rate, and if the results do not turn, the next contract — wherever it is — will be negotiated from a weaker position than the last one.

Streaming: 4 Million Followers, Almost No Streams

S1mple has one of the largest audiences in esports and does almost nothing with it. His Twitch channel has more than 4 million followers, and when he does go live he pulls 15,000–20,000 viewers — numbers most full-time streamers would trade a year for. He goes live a few hours a month, sometimes less. FarmSkins, in its August 2025 earnings breakdown, estimated his subscription income at that activity level at around $100–150 a month. TwitchTracker counted 83 active subscribers and about 10 streamed hours in a single month back in November 2022. The audience is there. The hours are not.

That makes streaming the smallest of his income streams by a distance — UK Gaming News models it at $200,000–$500,000 across his whole career, and even that generous figure is less than a tenth of the salary total. The comparison that puts it in perspective: a dedicated streamer with 4 million followers and 15,000 concurrent viewers could earn thousands a month from ads, subs and donations. S1mple treats streaming as a hobby, and the money reflects it. The one number that hints at what the audience is worth when he does monetise it is the course — covered in the next section — not the stream itself.

He has no YouTube channel of his own, which closes off the other obvious creator stream. His social following — 1.6 million on Instagram, around 800,000 on X, per FarmSkins — is large, but it is a brand asset rather than a revenue line: it is what makes sponsors pay, not what pays him directly.

Sponsorships, Stickers, and the “Play Like S1mple” Course

The brand list reads like a roll call of gaming’s biggest spenders. He became an AMD ambassador in 2019, the same year he appeared as an exclusive character in the mobile game Raid: Shadow Legends. He has worked with Logitech on gaming gear, with Red Bull, HyperX, Monster, GGBET, Puma, NVIDIA, GG.Bet, FaceIt, Anda Seat, Tinkoff, Nissan, DMarket, Philips OneBlade and CS.Money, and UK Gaming News adds a Nike collaboration to the list. Most of the NAVI-era deals ran through the organisation rather than to him personally, and none of the values were ever disclosed. FarmSkins estimates his personal deals brought in at least $100,000 a year. UK Gaming News models total sponsorship and brand income at $500,000–$2 million across his career — a wide band that reflects how little is public, and this article keeps the band rather than pretending to know the number.

Then there is the sticker money, the income stream unique to Counter-Strike. Every Major, Valve sells team and player sticker capsules, and the players take a cut. S1mple’s stickers — above all the graffiti on Cache commemorating his 2016 jumping double no-scope against Fnatic — have been among the most recognisable in the game for a decade. No reliable public figure exists for what he earned from them, and this article does not invent one. What can be said is that a player of his profile, across six Majors with NAVI, earned a meaningful sum from capsules, and that the income stopped when the Majors stopped: no Major appearance since 2023 means no new sticker revenue.

The strangest money story of the last two years is the course. In 2024 s1mple sold an educational course, “Play Like s1mple”, priced at $149.99. Win.gg reported that around 80,000 people signed up, which “could have brought in $12 million” — a figure that would dwarf his prize money twice over. Treat that number with real caution. No independent source has confirmed the sign-up count, the revenue was never disclosed, and 80,000 sign-ups at $150 would make a single online course the biggest payday of his career by a distance. This article prints the claim because a top competitor prints it, and flags it as unverified: if the number is real, the fortune is bigger than $9 million; if it is not, the anchor stands. Either way, the course shows what his name is worth when he sells directly to the audience instead of through a team.

Early Life and the Climb: Kyiv, Team Liquid, and the NAVI Call

Oleksandr Olehovych Kostyliev was born on October 2, 1997, in Kyiv, Ukraine. A few low-quality bios print October 1 — one profile site even prints both dates on the same page — but Wikipedia and the majority of biographies anchor October 2, and this article uses it. He started playing Counter-Strike at four years old, at the recommendation of his older brother, the detail that explains everything that followed: he did not discover the game as a teenager. He grew up inside it. Readers who want the birthday and age in full can find them in this site’s s1mple age profile, which covers his 29th birthday and the year-by-year timeline.

He picked up Counter-Strike: Global Offensive when it released in 2012 and joined his first professional team, LAN DODGERS, in 2013, at 15. Courage Gaming came next, and then the break: HellRaisers signed him in September 2014, when he was 16, putting him alongside ANGE1, Dosia, Kucher and Markeloff — the last of them a player s1mple has called his idol. A year with FlipSid3 Tactics followed in 2015, and then the gamble that changed his life: in early 2016 he moved to Los Angeles and joined Team Liquid, the biggest North American organisation in the game. With Liquid he reached the MLG Major Championship: Columbus 2016 semi-final, where his jumping double no-scope against Fnatic earned him a permanent graffiti on the Cache map — the kind of honour Valve hands out to a handful of plays in the game’s history.

He was homesick in America and did not stay long. In August 2016, Natus Vincere announced him as their fifth player, and he was back on home soil with the Ukrainian organisation he would call home for nine years. The first win came fast: ESL One: New York in October 2016, beating Virtus.pro in the grand final, and a No. 4 placing in the HLTV Top 20 for the year. He was 19, and the climb was over. The peak was next.

The NAVI Years: Three HLTV No. 1s and the Stockholm Major

The NAVI years are the reason the word GOAT follows s1mple around, and the numbers are stark. He was ranked the No. 1 player in the world by HLTV in 2018, 2021 and 2022, and No. 2 in 2019 and 2020 — five straight years in the top two, a run nobody else in Counter-Strike history has matched. A reported 21 HLTV MVP medals sit alongside those rankings. The peak came in November 2021 at PGL Major Stockholm, where NAVI won their first Major title and s1mple took the MVP award — eight years into his professional career, after a semi-final with a different team and two Major finals that had slipped away.

The trophies around the Major tell the same story: ESL One: New York 2016, IEM Katowice 2020 — where he was MVP — and the Intel Grand Slam Season 3, the $1 million bonus for winning four big events in a season. The 2021 season was the financial peak as well as the competitive one: $799,414 in prize money, more than the other twelve years of his career combined. And the context that makes the NAVI years extraordinary is the one that came after them: NAVI won their second Major, PGL Copenhagen 2024, while s1mple sat on the bench. The team he built could win without him. The player could not win without a team.

By any honest measure he is the greatest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player ever, and the case for the CS2 era is still open only because the CS2 era has barely started for him. The GOAT label is not hype. It is a shorthand for three No. 1 rankings, a Major MVP, and a decade as the face of the game.

The Break, the Loans, and the Return: 2023–2025

On October 26, 2023, s1mple announced he was stepping away from professional Counter-Strike, temporarily. The break came against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, which had already reshaped NAVI’s roster and forced the team to relocate, and after a year in which his form had dipped from its 2021–2022 peak. He missed the start of Counter-Strike 2 entirely — the new game launched while he was away — and he was on the bench when NAVI won the Copenhagen Major in March 2024.

The return came in pieces. A loan to Team Falcons in February 2024 put him back on a server, briefly, and a loan to FaZe Clan in 2025 put him back on a big stage — but neither loan turned into a home. The end of the NAVI era arrived on July 28, 2025, when the organisation released him after nine years, and BC.Game Esports announced his signing the same day. At the time of the transfer BC.Game sat 67th in the HLTV rankings. The move was a gamble in both directions: a tier-two organisation betting a reported $2.5 million on a roster rebuild around a 27-year-old legend, and a legend betting the last years of his prime on a team that had never played at his level.

That gamble is the story of 2026, and the results so far are in the section above. The break cost him the CS2 launch, the loans cost him two years of prime salary growth, and the BC.Game move has not yet paid off in trophies. The fortune survived all of it, because the fortune was already built. The legacy is the part still at stake.

S1mple vs the Other CS2 Greats: ZywOo, Dev1ce, NiKo

Wealth in Counter-Strike clusters at the top, and s1mple sits at the top of the cluster — but the gap is narrower than the GOAT debate suggests. The table below uses UK Gaming News’ June 2026 comparison as its base, cross-checked against Surprise Sports and FarmSkins where they disagree.

Two things stand out. First, NiKo has earned more prize money than s1mple — over $2.1 million against $1.73 million — and Surprise Sports puts NiKo’s net worth at $5–6 million on a reported $70,000-plus monthly salary at Team Falcons and a Razer deal signed in April 2025. Prize money is not the fortune. Salary is. Second, ZywOo is the coming threat to s1mple’s financial crown: a reported €100,000 a month at Vitality, the highest-paid Counter-Strike player in history when he signed his contract through 2026, with a career still in its prime and a Major win on home soil in Paris behind him. FarmSkins puts his net worth at $3.5–4.5 million after tax, on career earnings of $5–6 million — lower than s1mple today, but built in half the time. If ZywOo plays another five years at his current rate, the gap closes. Dev1ce, the four-time Major champion of the Astralis dynasty, is the steadiest of the four: $2 million-plus in prizes and a long career at the top, without ever being the game’s biggest earner.

The comparison also shows why s1mple’s range is so wide. His fortune depends on salary history, and salary history depends on how long you stayed at the top. He stayed the longest. That is the whole edge.

What the Fortune Looks Like After Tax: The Illustrative Maths

Gross earnings and net worth are different numbers, and the gap between them is where most net worth pages quietly cheat. This section does the haircut maths in the open, with every assumption labelled, so the reader can see how $9 million survives contact with reality. All figures here are the article’s own illustrative estimates, not reported facts.

Start with the gross career earnings the evidence supports: roughly $5–6 million in NAVI salary, $1.7 million in prize money, $500,000–$2 million in sponsorships, $200,000–$500,000 from streaming, and the BC.Game salary since July 2025. Add the midpoints and the gross career total lands near $8–10 million. Now the haircuts. Win.gg estimates s1mple kept around $1.4 million of the $1.7 million in prizes after tax — an 18% cut that reflects winnings taxed across many countries. Apply a similar rate to the salary and the take-home falls to roughly $4–5 million from NAVI. Agent and management fees in esports typically run 10–20%, and the cost of living as a travelling professional — boot camps, travel, a home base — takes another slice. Run those numbers and a $9 million net worth implies a man who earned $10 million-plus gross and kept most of it. That is plausible for a player who spent nine years at the top, lived modestly by superstar standards, and never had a public spending blowout. It is also why the $12 million ceiling is hard to reach without the unverified course revenue, and why the $2.5 million floor is impossible: the NAVI salary alone, after any plausible tax rate, clears it.

One more honest note: esports players do not get pensions, and a career that peaks at 24 can be over by 30. The $9 million has to last longer than a footballer’s fortune, because there is no second contract in a lower league and no coaching salary waiting at the end of it. That is the real financial story of s1mple’s career — not the size of the number, but how long it has to stretch.

Personal Life: Family, Privacy, and Life Off the Server

S1mple’s private life is small and well guarded. His older brother is the one family member the public knows anything about — he is the reason a four-year-old in Kyiv started playing Counter-Strike at all. His parents have stayed out of the coverage. He has never confirmed a public relationship, and he has never married. This article does not repeat dating rumours, because there is nothing verified to repeat, and the rumour cycle around famous gamers is an industry this site does not feed.

What is verifiable is the shape of his life off the server: a Ukrainian who left home at 18 to play in Los Angeles, came home to Kyiv, and then watched his home city become a war zone while he played for a Ukrainian organisation that had to relocate its players. The 2023 break cannot be understood without that backdrop. He is 29 now, playing for a tier-two team, streaming Dota 2 more than CS2, and still — on any honest ranking — the greatest player the game has produced. The money is settled. The ending is not.

Sources & Reporting

This article was reported in March–November 2026 from the following sources: StreamScheme (January 2026 — $6–12M range); UK Gaming News (June 2026 — $6–12M range, citing About Game World, June 2026; NAVI salary ~$50,000/month; prize money $1,725,255; BC.Game salary under $60,000/month per s1mple’s April 2026 statement; comparison table); win.gg (March 17 and March 23, 2026 — $8–9M estimate; Leniniw $120,000 claim; s1mple’s Telegram reply; “Play Like s1mple” course claim); Surprise Sports (updated October 10, 2026 — $2.5M outlier, flagged as stale; NiKo $5–6M; ZywOo $1.5M); TalkEsport (March 22, 2026 — BC.Game withdrawal from ROG JOURNEY Spring, VRS 41st, SAW core $2.5M, Dota 2 vs FACEIT match counts); MagazineMeme (2026 — BC.Game timeline, HLTV rank ~90th, April 2026 salary correction); EsportNow (October 23, 2026 — DraculaN Season 7, s1mple 0.79 rating); Dot Esports (August 4, 2026 — rumoured $500,000 transfer fee and $130,000 salary); FarmSkins (August 31, 2025 — $7–8M career earnings, Twitch subs ~$100–150/month, ZywOo €100k/month); Ensigame (prize money by year, $1,875,246 alternate total); Esports Earnings (prize money $1,725,255, 155 tournaments); Wikipedia (born October 2, 1997; HLTV No. 1 in 2018, 2021, 2022; PGL Major Stockholm 2021 MVP; team history); ShaneTheGamer (March 16, 2026 — Leniniw salary rumours); Get On Stream and iWealthyFox (stale low estimates, flagged); and this site’s own s1mple age profile. Figures are estimates unless stated as reported facts. Corrections: figures are updated when new reporting emerges — contact us via the About page if you spot an error.

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