Ledger CTO Sounds Alarm Over New Cryptographic Threats to Bitcoin

Two new cryptographic breakthroughs raise concerns over the future of Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, according to Ledger Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet. According to Guillemet's Oct. 30 post on X, a recent study shows that it might be easier to break the mathematics behind elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), which is how Bitcoin is secured. “Thought it was a bad week for crypto? You may have missed the real news,” wrote Guillemet. First, researchers at Ruhr University Bochum and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy have published a new study called “A Subexponential Time Algorithm for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm.” Elliptic-curve cryptography works by making it practically impossible to solve the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. The best general method to solve it so far has been Pollard’s rho algorithm.

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