Crypto
Bitcoin symbol
(Artur Widak/Getty Images)
What had happened was

We talked to the man who says Claude helped recover $400,000 worth of bitcoin locked in wallet for over a decade

“I was taking pictures of school notebooks and sent them to Claude, trying everything to piece anything together. I also said how I make passwords. I gave Claude context,” X user Cprkrn told us.

Yesterday was “the best day of my life” for anonymous X user “Cprkrn,” who said Claude helped him recover 5 bitcoin stuck for 11 years in a Blockchain wallet, encrypted with a forgotten second password. He bought the Bitcoin for “between $200 and $300,” and it’s now worth roughly $400,000.

In an X thread that has now gone viral, Cprkrn shared a post from August 8, 2023, with Blockchain data showing the wallet hadn’t had any transactions since April 2015. Arkham data shows the funds were sent to a hot wallet at Hyperunit yesterday. 

“Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password,” he posted. 

Sherwood News could not independently verify he is the owner of the wallet, as Cprkrn didn’t want to send a bitcoin transaction as proof. The timing of his posts and the transactions on the blockchain do correspond with Cprkrn’s narrative.

And while Cprkrn said that “Claude cracked this shit” online, it’s fair to say that Claude did not “crack” the bitcoin wallet per se, but helped him find the old wallet backup file on his computer. In other words, don’t worry about Q-day-level threats to cryptography yet.

“It’s exactly it. I did write down things illegibly and messed up the order of some words, so it figured that piece out, and then yeah, the seedphrase decrypted an older wallet, so yeah, it sort of went through all my files and was looking for clues with me,” Cprkrn told Sherwood News, adding that he used Claude Opus 4.7 for the endeavor.

Per the Claude recap, he also posted a breakdown of what worked: “The old wallet backup was decryptable with the old second password that we already knew from a notebook mnemonic. Decrypting the old backup with the old password gave us the same private keys controlling the current funds. Swept 5BTC out.”

Total passwords tested: around 3.5 trillion.

Cprkrn, who has been in the crypto space “since college,” said he didn’t use specific prompts but rather fed Claude a ton of information.  

“There is this, like, bitcoin recover I tried to use on my own, and then I kind of fed that into Claude so it had password recovery to lean off of, and then I talked back and forth,” he said.

He added that he had old MacBooks, old hard drives, and some cloud data repository, “so yeah, I basically gave it my full history.”

“I was taking pictures of school notebooks and sent them to Claude, trying everything to piece anything together. I also said how I make passwords. I gave Claude context,” he told Sherwood.

He said that a few weeks ago, Claude said it had figured it out (but in reality, it hadn’t), so yesterday he didn’t believe that it had actually done it this time.  

“And then I typed in the phrase and it fitted, and I didn’t expect that tweet to go viral,” he continued.

He told Sherwood that years ago, he had written down the password on an old phone he lost at a bar.

“We were playing pool, and I had my phone on a table, and then while I was shooting my shot, my buddy was trying to see if anyone had lost their phone, and some stranger took mine before I turned around/noticed,” he said. “I could be misremembering, of course, it was so long ago, but we always joked that it was his fault for accidentally giving my phone away.”

When asked whether he is now scared of wrench attacks, he said, “That was my first thing, that’s why I want to maybe cash out. It’s definitely a worry.”

So what’s next?

Cprkrn said he’s been a bitcoin proponent but has been “slightly disillusioned” by the crypto industry recently. When asked whether he’ll buy more bitcoin, he said, “Who knows?”

“I already work in the industry, so I have exposure in other ways. I’m kind of debating sitting tight, but I’m approaching the age where a house is appealing,” he said. “I think obviously it’s a good thing for us in the long haul, but I don’t know exactly, I need to play things smart.”

When asked whether plans for his impending wedding might change, he said: “We’ll get a couple extra flowers.”

 

More Crypto

See all Crypto
crypto

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

crypto

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.