How much does it cost to have Unciphered get you access to your wallet?

That’s quite a complicated question, as it turns out.

Building a company with cutting edge research at the core takes expertise, time, and resources. Because of this, Unciphered has been in the making for the last 5 years before opening to customers in early 2021. Our systems are both proprietary research for cracking wallets and proprietary systems for guaranteeing that the wallet we are opening is indeed yours. Trust, safety, and efficiency are our main drivers. Each wallet has unique criteria for gaining access to it. Based on your unique case we look at the resources, research (and potentially new tech), and time that we need to dedicate to your situation. GPUs, labs, and engineers all need resources to operate and we take this into account for your specific case. 

We couldn’t possibly charge our customers what it took to get us off the ground so we charge based on the needs of the situation and a percent of assets recovered.

So clients can afford our services!

The answer very much depends on your situation, what work we’ve done to crack wallets in situations similar to yours, and what resources, research, and time we will need to dedicate to your unique situation. Our engineers need to not only eat, but also keep the CPUs spinning and the labs running.

Let’s run through a few scenarios similar to what we’ve seen clients come in with:

SCENARIO 1: Physical Drive Failure 

If a client came to us with a physical drive failure, whether it’s 1 drive, 3 drives in a RAID configuration, or a massive failure of a 10 drive RAID array, but they still have access to their .dat file… if only they could recover the drives, our answer is going to be the same: you need to call Drive Savers. Why? Because we don’t touch harddrives with physical damage. To do that you need a clean room, specialized lab techs, and a whole heap of replacement parts for that specific version of that specific drive with that particular firmware on it. In other words, you need a specialist, especially when you’re dealing with vast amounts of crypto. (WARNING: DO NOT TRY TO OPEN THE DRIVE YOURSELF! Spinning drives are in sealed enclosures with near-vacuum atmospheres and a single speck of dust could permanently destroy your drive)

We’ve partnered with one such specialist and we’d be happy to get you in contact with a recommendation of how to proceed (we also can get you a bit of a discount). So, if you come in with only damaged hardware, we might recommend you go to Drive Savers, and their pricing model is fairly standard, in our experience usually ranging from $1,500-$3,000 per case*, though we’ve seen both lower and higher quotes. But they will analyze and quote your case for nothing or very close to it but never over what they quote on the phone or by email.

So, given those previous sample scenarios the pricing might go like this:

Single HDD Drive Failure: $1,500 - $3000*

Triple HDD Drive Failure: $4,500 - $9000*

10 HDD Drive Failure: $15,000 - $30,000*

NOTE: Drive Savers does not accept Crypto in payment. They will not accept a portion of your recovered assets as payment. I can’t believe I have to write this. They only accept payment before the work is done and you will only get the data that is retrievable

If your wallet is still locked out after retrieval you may sign on your agreement for data transfer to us and we will continue the work. If this is the case we can potentially deduct the fees you paid to drive savers off our total recovery fees(decision will be made on a per project basis).

SCENARIO 2: You Are Locked Out of Your Hardware/Software Wallet, but Your Wallet is Intact

If a client comes to us with an amount of crypto on a wallet albeit it be a Software or Hardware wallet, but they can’t get into that wallet because they lost their password/forgot their PIN, mnemonic/didn’t know they needed to remember their password, mnemonic, and passphrase/their non-custodial wallet service shutdown and in the process locked them out/non-damaged device lockout(bitlocker/Filevault on a hard drive, pin from a Ledger/Trezor/Ironkey), that’s where Unciphered can help recover your crypto and get you access to your wallet. But because there are so many scenarios within this scenario, giving specific pricing ahead of time would just be misleading. Instead, we will be general.

Generally, we charge nothing up front and accept a fraction of your crypto as payment once we get you access to your wallet. This means that if we fail, you don’t owe us anything for the attempt. 

On the back end, the percentage we take can be as low as 10% and as high as 35%. We will determine this based on the evaluation we give you before we begin work. If you have a software wallet that we have already done a lot of work on and can reliably crack your wallet with very little resources and time, then your percentage may drop or if it’s worth a lot (Discounts for wholesale pricing). If you have a case where we will need to reinvent the wheel and use quite a lot of resources, time, and sacrifice a few dozen Trezors, or Ledgers, or Ellipal Titans to the Crypto Gods to make sure this never before seen exploit works so there is next to zero risk to your crypto before we execute the exploit, then your percentage goes up.

We will of course negotiate this well before we begin to work on your wallet.

SCENARIO 3: Hardware Failure + Lockout

If you have an old harddrive with a wallet on it with some bitcoin you mined back in 2011, but left that harddrive in a closet and forgot about it until you recently looked at the value of that bit of crypto you left on there only to realize that once you plug it in it wouldn’t mount and you may have lost your crypto, and even if you had access to it you couldn’t remember your password, that’s where you would call Unciphered. After we evaluated your situation and took on your recovery, we would send your drive to Drive Savers, our hard drive recovery partner, to get your data off your drive, then we would take it to one of our labs to crack your wallet, after an interview process to get us as close to guaranteed success as possible.

In this case, your pricing model would look like this:

$1,500-$3,000* (To Drive Savers for Data Recovery) + 10%-35% of Crypto Recovered (To Unciphered for Wallet Recovery and Crypto Asset Recovery).
If your wallet is still locked out after retrieval you may sign on your agreement for data transfer to us and we will continue the work. If this is the case we can potentially deduct the fees you paid to drive savers off our total recovery fees (decision will be made on a per project basis).

So, there you have it. If you are locked out, go to the Let’s Go! Page on our website and we can begin your evaluation!

*These are not quotes, they are estimates. Drive Savers will give you an accurate quote for your case when you contact them.