Crypto guys bought the answer to the CIA’s mysterious Kryptos sculpture

On a windy day in March, artist Jim Sanborn greeted visitors at his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors made him sit in front of a laptop, and he wrote a secret message. They compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent it to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped this action would lead to his release. But did you do it?

This is the latest development in the story of Kryptos, the famous Sanborn sculpture that has stood outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The artwork is a 9-foot, 11-inch-tall S-shaped brass sculpture into which Sanborn punched four panels of ciphertext. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts alike have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three of the plates were solved, but the fourth plate of 97 letters, known as K4, was not solved. For decades, Sanborn has been offering solutions, all of them wrong. On the one hand, the secret of his letter was a remarkable reflection of the work of the intelligence community. On the other hand, it was a burden. In recent years, it has been inundated with AI-assisted submissions.

Sanborn has had enough. The 80-year-old artist also wanted to boost his retirement fund. So, in 2025, he arranges for an auction house to sell the answer to K4, as well as the solution to K5, an additional board that has not been revealed. In November, the highest bidder paid nearly $1 million for the prize, which included a scale model of the statue and other ephemera. Sanborn received $770,000. The identity of the winners and their plans for Kryptos have been another secret until now.

Today the winner emerges from the shadows. Paradigm, a venture capital firm focused on cryptocurrencies, is tasked with vetting the guesses until a genius finally solves the puzzle.

Like almost everything in the Kryptos saga, last year’s auction had some wild plot twists. Weeks before the deadline, researchers Garrett Kubiak and Richard Byrne told Sanborn that they had found the K4 script. The Smithsonian has Kryptos materials in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph the holdings. In the photographs, Kubik discovered that the artist had inadvertently included K4 plain text in his papers. Ultimately, the researchers agreed not to publish their solution, the Smithsonian closed the archives, and the auction continued as planned.

So who are these bidders? Paradigm is led by one of the founders of Coinbase. The fund backs cryptocurrency-related companies, builds open source software projects, and has recently expanded into artificial intelligence and robotics — a good choice given that bitcoin is in free fall and blockchain technology has lost its hype.

Paradigm partner Dan Robinson sits at a table with items from artist Jim Sanborn’s private Kryptos archive.

Courtesy of the model