Crypto recovery company Unciphered has extended Ripple's former chief technology officer (CTO) Stefan Thomas an offer to unlock a hard drive containing more than 7,000 Bitcoins ( BTC) that he had not been able to access for years.
In an open letter Wednesday, Unciphered proposed unlocking Thomas' IronKey hard drive, which holds 7,002 BTC, equivalent to about $244 million at the time of writing.
Thomas, a German-born programmer, forgets the password needed to access the drive, which is designed to erase its data after ten false attempts.
Currently, he only had two attempts left.
Unciphered claims to have developed a method to crack hardware and safely retrieve BTC keys that have been stored on drives for years.
*Unciphered Crashes IronKey Device After 200 Trillion Trials*
According to a recent report from technology magazine Wired, Unciphered managed to access data on a similar IronKey device after a staggering “200 trillion attempts,” apparently breaking the ten-attempt barrier.
“While there are always caveats, this is not theoretical,” Unciphered said.
The company expressed its willingness to showcase its capabilities on various samples to instill confidence before proceeding with the Thomas hard drive.
CEO Eric Michaud of Unciphered revealed that the company gained access to the data on the IronKey mentioned in the Wired report by extracting certain information from the drive and using an offline server.
This approach allows teams to make multiple attempts at guessing a password.
Although Michaud refrained from revealing what the company would ask for in return from Thomas, he emphasized that Unciphered has built a sustainable business to help individuals recover their lost or inaccessible crypto assets.
Nearly 20% of BTC Supply May Be Inaccessible
Besides Thomas, there are also many high-profile cases involving individuals struggling to recover or find their crypto keys.
In 2021, a Reddit user claimed to have regained access to 127 BTC after more than a decade by finding the private key on an old computer.
In 2013, British citizen James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing around 7,500 BTC and has since made several failed attempts to find and recover it from a landfill.
In total, some estimates suggest that around 20% of Bitcoin's total supply is inaccessible, leaving the billion-dollar cryptocurrency remaining locked indefinitely.