10 Years of Let's Encrypt

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Let’s Encrypt issued its first publicly-trusted certificate on September 14, 2015, marking the start of its journey.
By 2025, Let’s Encrypt became the largest certificate authority globally, issuing millions of certificates daily and nearing protection for one billion websites.
The ACME protocol, created and standardized by Let’s Encrypt, is widely integrated into the server ecosystem.
Let’s Encrypt's automation and scalability vision succeeded, with issuance growing from one million certificates in 2016 to ten million daily by 2025.
The organization significantly increased HTTPS encryption prevalence globally, from below 30% to around 80%, enhancing web security.
Key milestones include the first certificate issuance (2015), one millionth certificate (2016), and one billionth certificate (2020).
Notable features introduced include internationalized domain name support (2016), wildcard certificates (2018), and short-lived/IP address certificates (2025).
Infrastructure upgrades, like database server enhancements and faster Ethernet, were necessary to handle growing data volumes.
Let’s Encrypt received awards such as the 2022 Levchin Prize and the 2019 O’Reilly Open Source Award.
Initial sponsors like Mozilla, EFF, Cisco, Akamai, and IdenTrust were crucial to Let’s Encrypt's launch and success.

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