• Crypto recovery firm Unciphered offers to unlock a hard drive with $244 million in Bitcoin for former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas.
• Unciphered claims they can crack the hardware and access the Bitcoin keys securely, bypassing the ten-attempt limit and showcasing confidence in their solution.

Crypto recovery firm Unciphered has made a bold proposition to Stefan Thomas, former CTO of Ripple. In an open letter dated October 25th, Unciphered expressed its willingness to unlock an IronKey hard drive owned by Thomas, which holds a staggering 7,002 BTC. At the time of the letter, these Bitcoins were worth approximately $244 million.

The crux lies in Thomas’s inability to remember the IronKey hard drive password. This device’s design involves permanently wiping its data after ten incorrect password attempts. Thomas has already exhausted eight of these attempts, leaving him with just two more chances to regain access to his cryptocurrency fortune.

Unciphered, however, seems undeterred by this seemingly insurmountable problem. The company asserts that it has developed a method to crack the hardware and securely access the BTC keys that have remained dormant for years. A report published by technology magazine Wired revealed that Unciphered accessed the data on a similar IronKey device after an astonishing “200 trillion tries. “This remarkable feat seemingly bypasses the hard drive’s stringent ten-attempt limit.

In a statement, Unciphered exudes confidence in its ability to deliver results, stating;

Though there are always caveats, this is not theoretical. We can do it; we’ve done it many times before… And we can do it again. You don’t have to take our word for it… we would be happy to demonstrate it on as many samples in a row as it takes for you (and everyone) to feel confident before moving forward.

Unlocking the IronKey: The Technical Approach

In an interview with a leading news outlet, Unciphered’s CEO, Eric Michaud, shed some light on the company’s approach to unlocking the IronKey. Michaud explained that they were able to access the data on a similar device mentioned in the Wired report by extracting information from the drive and using offline servers. This innovative technique gave their team multiple opportunities to guess the password correctly.

While Michaud did not specify the terms of their potential collaboration with Stefan Thomas, he emphasized that Unciphered had built a “sustainable business” centered around helping individuals recover lost or inaccessible cryptocurrencies. Michaud added;

We’re prepared if Stefan doesn’t want to work with us, but we’re hopeful. We already have a growing business, and we’ll be here when he’s ready.

A Familiar Tale in the World of Cryptocurrency

Stefan Thomas’s predicament is not an isolated case in cryptocurrency. There have been numerous stories of individuals who have either forgotten their passwords or lost access to their cryptocurrency holdings for various reasons. In 2021, a Reddit user claimed to have regained access to 127 BTC after more than a decade, discovering the private keys on an old computer. 

In 2013, British national James Howells mistakenly discarded a hard drive containing approximately 7,500 BTC. He has since made multiple unsuccessful attempts to locate and recover the drive, which now rests in a landfill.

The challenges individuals like Stefan Thomas and James Howells face highlight a significant issue in cryptocurrency. Estimates from 2022 suggested that Bitcoin’s total supply may have lost or been permanently inaccessible by approximately 20 percent. This translates to billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency effectively locked away in digital vaults, forever beyond reach.