Crypto VC Firm Paradigm Pays Nearly $1 Million for Solution to CIA's Unsolved Kryptos Sculpture Puzzle

Kryptos, a copper S-curve sculpture installed outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia in 1990, contains four panels of encrypted text created by artist Jim Sanborn. Three panels were solved within a decade, but the 97-character fourth panel, K4, has never been cracked. Sanborn, now 80, arranged an auction in 2025 to sell the solution — partly to relieve himself of decades of unsolicited guesses and partly to bolster his retirement fund — ultimately netting $770,000. The winning bidder, Paradigm, a crypto-focused VC firm co-founded by a Coinbase co-founder, plans to run the puzzle as an open online challenge, charging $1 per submission and hosting progressive decoding contests with $1,000 prizes. The auction was nearly upended when researchers Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne discovered what appeared to be K4's plaintext in Sanborn's papers held at the Smithsonian, though they agreed not to publish it and the Smithsonian locked down the archive. Paradigm says its own team has not looked at the solution; submissions will be verified using a hash function applied to the correct answer. Sanborn also revealed the existence of a K5 panel, which he says will become solvable only after K4 is cracked, and hinted he may embed the K5 ciphertext in one of his public projection artworks.