Let's Encrypt GA

 April 13, 2016

Yesterday, Let’s Encrypt moved from beta to GA. During the beta phase, which started last September, more than 1.7 million certificates were issued.

I think this is a crucial step for the project and overall for the Internet as well. Until now, the only way to obtain a valid TLS certificate was to pay a CA. This artificial constraint made no sense since the CAs were forcing users to buy an insurance policy that made no sense (and often, it was completely worthless).

In the next five years, I predict that we will see the number of TLS-protected websites rise to the hundreds of millions, thanks to Let’s Encrypt and, potentially, other similar efforts.