On a stormy day in March, artist Jim Sanborn welcomes visitors to his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors made him sit in front of a laptop and he typed a secret message. He compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent it to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped that this action would free him. But did?
It’s the latest twist in the story of Kryptos, the famous Sanborn sculpture that has stood outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The artwork is a copper S-curve measuring 9 feet, 11 inches long, into which Sanborn punched four panels of encrypted text. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts alike have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three panels were resolved—but not the 97-character fourth panel, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been offering solutions, every one of which is wrong. On the one hand, the mystery of his message was a brilliant reflection of the work of the intelligence community. On the other hand, it has been a burden; In recent years he has been overwhelmed by Cockmammy, AI-assisted productions.
Sanborn had a lot. The 80-year-old artiste also wanted to increase his retirement fund. So in 2025 they arranged for an auction house to sell the answer to K4 as well as the solution to K5, an additional panel that has not been disclosed. In November, the highest bidder paid nearly a million dollars for the prize, which included a small model of the sculpture and other ephemera. Sanborn took home $770,000. The identity of the winners and their plans for the cryptos were yet another mystery.
Today the winner is coming out of the shadows. Paradigm, a crypto-focused VC firm, is taking over the job of testing the guesses until a genius finally solves the puzzle.
Like almost everything in the cryptos saga, last year’s auction had some wild storylines. A few weeks before the deadline, two researchers, Jarrett Kobek and Richard Byrne, told Sanborn that they had found K4’s text. The Smithsonian has the Cryptos material in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph the holdings. Kobek discovered in the photographs that the artist had inadvertently included the K4 plaintext in his papers. Ultimately, the researchers agreed not to release their solution, the Smithsonian closed the archives, and the auction proceeded as planned.
So who are these bidders? Paradigm is led by the co-founder of Coinbase. The fund supports crypto-related companies, creates open-source software projects, and has recently expanded into AI and robotics – a good call as Bitcoin has been falling rapidly and blockchain has lost its popularity.
