On a blustery March day, the artist Jim Sanborn received visitors at his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors 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 that to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped that this action would set him free. But did it?
That’s the latest twist in the story of Kryptos, the famous Sanborn sculpture that’s been sitting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The artwork is a copper S-curve that stands 9 feet, 11 inches tall, into which Sanborn had punched four panels of encrypted text. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts alike have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three of the panels were solved—but not the 97-character fourth panel, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been fielding solutions, every one of them wrong. On the one hand, the mystery of his message was a brilliant reflection of the intelligence community’s work. On the other, it’s been a burden; in recent years he’s been deluged by cockamamie, AI-assisted submissions.
Sanborn had had enough. The 80-year-old artist also wanted a boost to his retirement fund. So in 2025 he arranged for an auction house to sell off the answer to K4—as well as the solution to K5, an additional panel that hasn’t been revealed. In November, the highest bidders paid almost a million dollars for the prize, which included a mini-model of the sculpture and other ephemera. Sanborn took home $770,000. The identity of the winners and their plans for Kryptos were yet another secret—until now.
Today the winner is stepping out of the shadows. Paradigm, a crypto-focused VC firm, is taking over the job of vetting guesses until some genius finally solves the puzzle.
Like nearly everything in the Kryptos saga, last year’s auction had some wild plot twists. Weeks before the deadline, two researchers, Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne, told Sanborn they had found the text of K4. The Smithsonian has Kryptos materials in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph the holdings. Kobek discovered in the photos that the artist had unintentionally included K4 plaintext in his papers. Ultimately, the researchers agreed not to release their solution, the Smithsonian locked down the archives, and the auction proceeded as planned.
So who are these bidders? Paradigm was cofounded by a cofounder of Coinbase. The fund backs crypto-related companies, builds open-source software projects, and more recently has expanded into AI and robotics—a good call since Bitcoin is in free fall and the blockchain has lost its buzz.
