On April 13, 2022, the Real World Crypto steering committee presented the Max Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography to Let’s Encrypt. The following is the speech delivered by our Executive Director, Josh Aas upon receiving the award. We’d like to thank our community for supporting us and invite you to join us in making the Internet more secure and privacy-respecting for everyone.
Thank you to the Real World Crypto steering committee and to Max Levchin for this recognition. I couldn’t be more proud of what our team has accomplished since we started working on Let’s Encrypt back in 2013.
My first temptation is to name some names, but there are so many people who have given a significant portion of their lives to this work over the years that the list would be too long. You know who you are. I hope you’re as proud as I am at this moment.
Let’s Encrypt is currently used by more than 280 million websites, issuing between two and three million certificates per day. I often think about how we got here, looking for some nugget of wisdom that might be useful to others. I’m not sure I’ve really come up with anything particularly profound, but I’m going to give you my thoughts anyway. Generally speaking: we started with a
pretty good idea, built a strong team, stayed focused on what’s important, and kept ease of use in mind every step of the way.
Let’s Encrypt ultimately came from a group of people thinking about a pretty daunting challenge. The billions of people living increasingly large portions of their lives online deserved better privacy and security, but in order to do that we needed to convince hundreds of millions of websites to switch to HTTPS. Not only did we want them to make that change, we wanted most of them to make the change within the next three to five years.
We thought through a lot of options but in the end we just didn’t see any o
