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Anonymous Buyer Pays $962,500 for Kryptos Secret
Anonymous buyer paid $962,500 for the solution to CIA's Kryptos sculpture K4 passage, vowing to keep it secret. No crypto entities were involved, but the custody puzzle echoes decentralized trust debates.
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An anonymous buyer now holds the solution to the fourth passage of Jim Sanborn's Kryptos sculpture. They have said they will not reveal it.
The complete Kryptos archive, including the answer to the K4 passage that has stumped cryptographers since 1990, sold for $962,500 at an RR Auction that closed November 20. That price nearly doubled the $500,000 high end of pre-sale estimates.
Kryptos is an S-shaped copper sculpture installed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on November 3, 1990. Its surface holds roughly 1,800 characters split into four encrypted passages, each using a different cryptographic method.
The first three passages, known as K1 through K3, were solved over the years by CIA analysts, NSA cryptographers, and amateur puzzle enthusiasts. K4, a 97-character stretch, resisted every attempt.
In 2025, two independent researchers found the K4 plaintext inside Sanborn's archives at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. They did not crack the code. They found the answer in a box.