On a windy March day, artist Jim Sanborn welcomed guests to his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The guests sat him down in front of a laptop and he typed in a secret message. They compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent it to the cloud, and wiped the laptop immaculate. Sanborn hoped this action would free him. But did it work?
This is the latest twist in the history of Kryptos, the celebrated Sanborn sculpture that has stood outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The work is an S-shaped copper curve, 9 feet, 11 inches high, into which Sanborn stamped four panels of ciphertext. Since then, both professional and amateur cryptanalysts have been trying to crack the code. Three panels were resolved over a ten-year period, but not the fourth panel of 97 characters, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been proposing solutions, and every one of them is wrong. On the one hand, the secrecy of his message was a brilliant reflection of the work of the intelligence community. On the other hand, it was a burden; has been inundated with goofy AI-powered submissions in recent years.
Sanborn had had enough. The 80-year-old artist also wanted to raise his retirement fund. That’s why he organized an auction house in 2025 sell the answer to K4 – as well as the K5 solution, an additional panel that has not been revealed. The highest bidders paid in November almost a million dollars for the prize, which included a mini model of the sculpture and other ephemera. Sanborn took home $770,000. The identities of the victors and their plans for Kryptos have been another mystery – until now.
Today the winner comes out of the shadows. Paradigm, a VC firm specializing in cryptocurrencies, takes over the task of checking the guesses until some genius finally solves the mystery.
Like almost everything in the Kryptos saga, last year’s auction had some crazy twists and turns. A few weeks before the deadline, two researchers, Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne, told Sanborn that they had found the K4 text. The Smithsonian has Kryptos material in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph the resources. Kobek discovered in the photos that the artist had accidentally included K4 plaintext in his documents. Ultimately, the researchers agreed not to publish their solution, the Smithsonian closed its archives, and the auction went on as planned.
So who are these bidders? Paradigm is run by the co-founder of Coinbase. The fund supports cryptocurrency-related companies, creates open-source software projects, and recently expanded into artificial intelligence and robotics – a good choice as Bitcoin is in freefall and blockchain has lost its buzz.