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On a fateful March day, artist Jim Sanborn welcomed visitors to his studio on a remote island in the Chesapeake Bay. The guests sat him down in front of the laptop, and wrote a secret message. They encrypted the message using a special hash, sent it to the cloud, and wiped the laptop. Sanborn hoped that doing so would set him free. But did it?
That’s the latest twist in the story KryptosSanborn’s famous sculpture that has been outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The sculpture is a bronze S-curve that stands 9 feet, 11 inches tall, into which Sanborn nailed four panels of hidden text. Amateur cryptanalysts have also been trying to crack the codes ever since. Within ten years, three panels were abolished—but not the fourth panel of 97 characters, known as K4. Over the years, Sanborn has been offering solutions, all wrong. On the other hand, the secret of his message was the intellectual reflection of the work of the intellectual community. On the other hand, it has become a burden; in recent years they have been flooded with cockamamie, AI-powered offerings.
Sanborn had had enough. The 80-year-old actress also wanted to boost her retirement fund. So in 2025 they planned to sell the products to sell the K4 response—as well as the K5 response, an undisclosed additional group. In November, most advertisers paid about a million dollars for the prize, which included a miniature of the sculpture and other ephemera. Sanborn took home $770,000. The identity of the winners and their plans for Kryptos was another mystery until now.
Today the winner is coming out of the shadows. Paradigm, a VC firm focused on crypto, is taking on the role of speculative research until an expert solves the problem.
Like almost everything in the Kryptos saga, last year to sell had a negative effect. A few weeks before the deadline, two researchers, Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne, told Sanborn that they had found K4’s voice. The Smithsonian has Kryptos artifacts in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph the contents. Kobek found the photos that the artist had by accident also included K4’s voice in his papers. In the end, the researchers agreed not to release their answer, the Smithsonian closed the archives, and the sale went ahead as planned.
So who are the advertisers? Paradigm is led by the cofounder of Coinbase. The fund supports crypto-related companies, builds open source software, and has recently expanded into AI and robotics—a good call since Bitcoin is in free fall and blockchain has lost ground.
