LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyOn 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 is led 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.
Paradigm partner Dan Robinson sits at a table with items from artist Jim Sanborn's private Kryptos archive.
Dan Robinson, who joined Paradigm in 2019, had been fascinated with cryptography since he was a kid. Last summer he read my article about the auction and began thinking that the firm should get involved. “There's really nothing else like it,” he says. “It fit a lot of our philosophy about the kind of things we like to support in the world.” Plus, Robinson hopes that owning Kryptos will help attract top talent to the firm.
To encourage guesses and discourage brute-force attempts to crack the encrypted text, the firm will charge $1 per submission (Sanborn had been charging $50). Paradigm will also hold contests with increasingly difficult decoding challenges. The first to crack those puzzles will win $1,000.
The prize for solving K4 is not cash, but glory. Oh, and unique access to a video that Sanborn pretaped for the successful codebreaker.
In theory, Kobek—the guy who found the answer at the Smithsonian—could blow all this up by publishing the plaintext of K4. But when I reached him this week, he reiterated his promise from last year: “There will never be a moment in which the plaintext is published by me.”
Robinson tells me that even the Paradigm people don’t know the answer to K4—they haven’t looked. Starting today, potential codebreakers can send their solutions to the new Kryptos website. Since the real answer was run through a hash function to generate a unique identifier, or hash, submissions will go through the same function. If the two hashes match, the long quest will be over. Sort of.
Along with the secret answers, the auction lot contained a model of the sculpture at CIA headquarters and other Kryptos ephemera.
There’s still the mystery of K5. Sanborn says that once K4 is solved, K5 will somehow become solvable. Exactly how is yet another Kryptos mystery. Robinson says that when the time comes, Paradigm will publish the encrypted K5 and invite people to crack it.
In theory, this ought to be closure for Sanborn. He has passed stewardship of his secrets. He’s handed the Paradigm people sealed envelopes containing the plaintext solutions to K4 and even K5, which they say they did not open. He’s cashed his check. But when I spoke to him, I sensed that he wasn’t really letting it go.
“I guarantee there will be people that don't know anything about the auction, and I am going to tell them when they contact me to please contact Paradigm.” But knowing the Kryptos world, he suspects they may not listen. In that case, he won’t freeze them out. “I mean, I’m not shutting down my email,” he says. “People might still want me to, you know, look at it.”
He speculates that he may even provide a teaser to the K5 ciphertext, by including it in a longer stream of scrambled characters in one of his public artworks—he’s been doing “projection cylinders,” where he beams long text passages onto vast surfaces. “I could embed K5 in that,” he says. “It would be in there, waiting.”
So even though Paradigm is the official keeper of the Kryptos secret, Sanborn has not faded away. All the while his stunning creation endures at Langley, mocking the efforts of the mighty intelligence community to seek the truth.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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