On a brisk March day, artist Jim Sanborn welcomed visitors to his studio on a secluded island in the Chesapeake Bay. Guests sat down with him in front of the laptop, and he wrote a secret message. They encrypted the message using a unique hash function, sent it to the cloud, and wiped the laptop. Sanborn hoped that this move would set him free. But what?
That’s the latest twist in the story Kryptosthe famous statue of Sanborn that has sat outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The sculpture is a bronze S-curve that is 9 feet, 11 inches tall, into which Sanborn had engraved four panels of coded text. Professional and lay cryptanalysts have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three panels were solved—but not the fourth panel of 97 letters, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been searching for solutions, each one wrong. On the one hand, the mystery of his message was a good reflection of the work of the intelligence community. On the other hand, it has been a burden; in recent years he has been inundated with cockamamie, AI-assisted presentations.
Sanborn had had enough. The 80-year-old artist also wanted to increase his retirement fund. So in 2025 he arranged an auction house for export the answer to K4—with the solution to K5, an additional unexposed panel. In November, the highest bidders paid almost a million dollars for the prize, which includes a small model of the sculpture and other ephemera. Sanborn took home $770,000. The identity of the conquerors and their plans for Kryptos was another mystery—until now.
Today the winner comes out of the shadows. Paradigm, a stealth-focused VC firm, takes it upon itself to screen predictions until an expert solves the puzzle.
Like almost everything in the Kryptos saga, of last year auction had some plot twists. Weeks before the deadline, two researchers, Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne, told Sanborn they had found the K4 text. The Smithsonian has Kryptos materials in its archives, and Byrne went to photograph them. Kobek discovered in the photos that the artist had inadvertently with K4 text in his papers. In the end, the researchers agreed not to release their solution, the Smithsonian closed the archives, and the auction went ahead as planned.
So who are these bidders? Paradigm is led by the co-founder of Coinbase. The fund funds crypto-related companies, creates open-source software projects, and more recently has expanded into AI and robotics—a good call since Bitcoin is in freefall and blockchain has lost its buzz.
