Paradigm vetting – A crypto-focused VC firm is now vetting proposed solutions to K4, the 97-character encrypted panel on Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos sculpture outside CIA headquarters in Langley. The move follows a 2025 auction where bidders paid nearly $1 million for the K4 answer an
On a blustery March day. Jim Sanborn sat visitors down in front of a laptop on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. He typed a secret message into a system that compressed it using a unique hash function. pushed the result to the cloud. and then wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn’s intention was simple: make sure the answer would still exist—later—if anything happened to him.
Whether it truly set him free is the question Kryptos has been forcing on people for decades.
The sculpture itself—Jim Sanborn’s copper S-curve—stands 9 feet, 11 inches tall outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It contains four panels of encrypted text. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts have been trying to crack it since the artwork was installed in 1990. Within about a decade, three of the panels were solved. The fourth, K4, remains the holdout: a 97-character panel that has resisted every submitted solution.
Sanborn has spent years dealing with answers that were wrong—sometimes so wrong they barely resembled the right trail. In recent years, he also faced a new kind of flood: cockamamie, AI-assisted submissions. At 80 years old, he decided he’d had enough—and he wanted a boost for his retirement fund.
In 2025. Sanborn arranged for an auction house to sell off the answer to K4. and also the solution to K5. an additional panel that hasn’t been revealed. In November of that year, the highest bidders paid almost a million dollars for the prize. The package included a mini-model of the sculpture and other ephemera, and Sanborn took home $770,000.
But the real twist wasn’t just the money. The identities of the winners, and what they planned to do with the answers, stayed hidden—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.” 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—an expansion framed by the story’s own timing. as Bitcoin has been in free fall and the blockchain has lost some of its buzz.
This handoff didn’t happen in a clean, straight line. Last year’s auction came with its own near-spy thriller.
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 then discovered in those photos that Sanborn had unintentionally included K4 plaintext in his papers. The two researchers ultimately agreed not to release their solution.
What happened next mattered. The Smithsonian locked down the archives, and the auction proceeded as planned.
The Kryptos saga has always lived at the uneasy intersection of public puzzle and private work. Now the baton is being passed from a decades-long crowd of cryptanalysts to a firm that sits closer to modern crypto infrastructure and its tools.
For Sanborn, the auction was a chance to turn the mystery into something that could fund his later years. For Kryptos, the questions never really stopped—only changed shape. After years of wrong answers and relentless submissions. the K4 hunt is entering a new phase. with Paradigm promising to keep proposed guesses from running loose. until the last panel is finally. fully solved.
Kryptos Jim Sanborn CIA Langley K4 K5 Paradigm Coinbase crypto VC hash function Smithsonian archives cryptography