LANGLEY, VIRGINIA — Artist Jim Sanborn transferred control of the decryption process for his Kryptos sculpture to Paradigm, a venture capital firm. Paradigm will now manage public submissions for the K4 panel solution and oversee the release of the K5 panel once K4 is solved. Sanborn received $770,000 from an auction arranged to sell the solution to the K5 panel.

Sanborn provided Paradigm with sealed envelopes containing the plaintext solutions to both K4 and K5. Paradigm stated that they have not opened these envelopes. In March, Sanborn received visitors at his Chesapeake Bay island studio. He typed a secret message into a laptop, and the visitors then compressed the message using a hash function, sent it to the cloud, and wiped the laptop. The Kryptos solution was processed through a hash function to generate a unique identifier, and submissions to a new Kryptos website will be processed using the same hash function.

Potential codebreakers can now send solutions to a new Kryptos website. Paradigm will charge $1 per submission for guesses to the Kryptos solution, a change from Sanborn, who previously charged $50 per submission. He recorded a video for the successful solver of the K4 panel. Sanborn stated that the K5 panel will become solvable once the K4 panel is decoded.

The Kryptos sculpture, a copper S-curve standing 9 feet, 11 inches tall with four panels of encrypted text, has been located outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. Three of the Kryptos panels were solved within a decade of its installation; however, the fourth panel, known as K4, which contains 97 characters, has not been solved. The K5 panel has not been publicly revealed.

Sanborn has received solution submissions for the Kryptos cipher for decades, including AI-assisted submissions in recent years, all of which were incorrect. Paradigm partner Dan Robinson said that Paradigm plans to publish the encrypted K5 panel when the time comes. Robinson also stated, "There's really nothing else like it. It fit a lot of our philosophy about the kind of things we like to support in the world."

Researcher Jarett Kobek discovered the K4 plaintext in Sanborn's papers that were photographed at the Smithsonian archives. Weeks before the auction deadline, Kobek and researcher Richard Byrne informed Sanborn that they had found the text of K4. Kobek and Byrne agreed not to release their solution to the K4 panel. Sanborn indicated that people will still contact him with submissions. "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." Sanborn said. He also said, "I mean, I'm not shutting down my email. People might still want me to, you know, look at it."