According to Cointelegraph, crypto recovery firm Unciphered has offered to unlock a hard drive containing 7,002 BTC (approximately $244 million) belonging to former Ripple chief technology officer Stefan Thomas. Thomas has been unable to access the IronKey hard drive for years after forgetting the necessary information. The device is designed to erase its data if the incorrect password is entered ten times, and Thomas has already used eight of his ten attempts. Unciphered claims to have developed a method to crack the hardware and access the BTC keys safely stored for years.

In an October 25 report by technology magazine Wired, the company was able to access data on a similar IronKey after '200 trillion tries,' seemingly bypassing the 10-attempt restriction on the drive. Unciphered CEO Eric Michaud declined to disclose what the firm would ask for in return from Thomas but stated that the company has created a 'sustainable business' helping people recover crypto. There have been numerous highly publicized stories of users losing access to their keys or struggling to recover them. In 2022, estimates suggested that users could have lost access to roughly 20% of Bitcoin's supply, amounting to billions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency.