Crypto recovery firm offers to recover Bitcoin worth $244 mln

• Tech magazine Wired also testified that Unciphered had helped them recover data on a similar IronKey device, after “200 trillion tries.”
• Nearly 29% of Bitcoin’s total circulating supply might be lost forever.

Crypto recovery firm Unciphered has offered to recover 7,002 Bitcoin [BTC] locked on the wallet of Stefan Thomas, former Ripple [XRP] chief technology officer (CTO).

Thomas has an IronKey hard drive holding Bitcoin worth $244 million (at press time). But he forgot the details necessary to unlock and access the drive. So far, he has already made eight attempts to access the drive, but has been unsuccessful thus far.

He has only two attempts left to gain access to his tokens.

If these two attempts also fail, it will erase all the information stored on the drive, including private keys that are required to access the stored cryptocurrency.

Notably, Unciphered wrote an open letter to Thomas on 25 October. It claimed its team can bypass the 10-try limit to unlock his wallet through a loophole in the wallet, thanks to the efforts of hardware hackers, crypto mathematicians, and exploit developers.

The team claimed to have successfully unlocked IronKey hard drives multiple times. It is confident in its ability to do so again.

Tech magazine Wired also published a supportive testimony on 25 October. It claimed that Unciphered had helped them recover data lost on a similar IronKey device, after “200 trillion tries.”

Unciphered didn’t mention in the letter how much it was going to charge Thomas for the recovery. So far, there was no indication of Thomas taking up the offer either.

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Huge volume of Bitcoin lost

Blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock revealed in July 2023 that nearly 29% of Bitcoin’s total circulating supply might be lost forever. These tokens showed no signs of movement for over five years.

Ever wondered how many Bitcoins are lost forever? Our data shows that 29% of $BTC hasn’t moved in over 5 years. It’s possible that a large part of this concerns lost coins. #Bitcoin

— IntoTheBlock (@intotheblock) July 17, 2023

On 17 July, analytics firm Glassnode had claimed at the time that the total quantity of lost Bitcoins had reached an all-time high (ATH) of 7,781,224.168 BTC.

📈 #Bitcoin $BTC Amount of HODLed or Lost Coins just reached a 5-year high of 7,781,224.168 BTC

View metric:https://t.co/dJK8rxBVD3 pic.twitter.com/nF9KjaR2jv

— glassnode alerts (@glassnodealerts) July 17, 2023

Such astonishing figures are worrying, as they have a significant impact on trading volume on a day-to-day basis.