Unciphered Confident to Crack Ex-Ripple CTO’s Hard Drive Holding $244M Bitcoin

The German-based recovery firm has, in a recent statement, petitioned the ex-Ripple chief technology executive Stefan Thomas to help recover the IronKey hard drive holding 7002 Bitcoins. The former chief tech executive has admitted inability to access the hard drive with only two guesses remaining. 

Unciphered Petitions to Regain Access to Hard Drive Holding $244M Bitcoin 

The recovery firm penned an open petition to the ex-Ripple tech executive Stefan Thomas to salvage over 7000 Bitcoin. The former technology head at the firm behind the XRP token confirmed making eight unsuccessful attempts to access the tokens valued at $244 million.

The former officer at Ripple admitted to forgetting the information necessary to access the drive. He decries that the drive design limits the access attempts to ten upon exhaustion, which would erase the data. The German programmer confessed to using eight of the ten available. 

Unciphered’s open letter hails its team for developing a unique mechanism to crack the hardware. By doing so, Unciphered utilizes the method to access access keys safely without interference with the content. 

The technology news outlet Wired revealed on Wednesday, October 25, that Unciphered had successfully accessed data stored in a similar IronKey. The publication indicates that Unciphered succeeded in the 200 trillion trial – thereby bypassing the tenth attempt cap. 

Unciphered indicated that despite caveats, the team has proven its capability to recover multiple times. As such, the firm cites previous success to prove they can realize it on the Thomas hard drive. 

Unciphered indicated that the team would readily illustrate its capabilities by using multiple samples for the party to build confidence before the trial on the actual hard drive. Unciphered chief executive Eric Michaud admitted accessing the data in the IronKey from the Wired’s publication. The team extracted some information and leveraged the offline servers to realize a better position at guessing the lost password. 

Michaud failed to state the compensation it would demand from Thomas. Nevertheless, Unciphered’s boss admitted to creating a sustainable business to assist individuals in recovering their crypto. 

Unciphered Asserts Preparedness to Overcome Limits on Hard Drives

The Unciphered executive admitted that the firm is prepared even if the former Ripple officer is unwilling to work with the team. He added that the team is optimistic about working with Thomas, illustrating that the firm’s recovery business had expanded, fueled by nurtured capabilities. 

Unciphered proposal to help the former tech head at Ripple Labs reincarnate the publicized accounts of recovery attempts to lost keys. Also, multiple users admit to losing the location of their keys. A 2021 case involved Redditor successfully regaining access to 127 Bitcoin after ten years. The user confirmed locating the private keys from the old computer.

A recent case involves a British national who, in 2013, erroneously discarded a hard drive that had 7500 bitcoins. James Howells admits attempting to recover the device from the landfill unsuccessfully. 

The estimates from last year’s report illustrate that crypto users have lost a fifth of Bitcoin’s supply. The lost bitcoins are worth billions of dollars fortune. 

Competitiveness in Private Key Recovery Solutions

The rampant cases of misplaced private keys prompted hardware wallet provider Ledger to unveil a cloud-based recovery solution. The package seeks to recover the private keys, though it has attracted criticism from the digital assets community. 

The Ledger Recover solution involves an identity-based service to recover lost private keys. The hardware wallet firm unveiled the service on Tuesday, October 24, coinciding with the completion of open-source code. The firm confirmed finalizing the open-source code project on GitHub. 

Ledger indicated that the seed phrase solution for recovery is powered through the blockchain protection platform Coincover as a subscription-based service. The services rival the Unciphered recovery process, though unique, by mandating the users back the Secret Recovery Phrase (SRP). 

Unlike Unciphered, Ledger halted the recovery services for private keys in May 2023 following widespread community backlash. Ledger chief executive Pascal Gauthier admitted that the pause is temporary and would unveil the product again after rolling out the open-source code.  

Unciphered petition to regain Thomas private key would earn mark the firm’s entry into the recovery solution. The move coincides with a period when second-ranked Trezor reiterated it would steer clear of the cloud-based recovery of private keys. Instead, Trezor emphasizes using the physical seed phrase to recover the keys.