Also it&#x27;s called &quot;Crypto Experts,&quot; which in this particular field somehow pegs my contrarian indicator button.<p>If they&#x27;d claimed to have designed a modern alternative to SSL using modern crypto primitives that&#x27;s one thing. That&#x27;s hard and requires solid crypto and coding knowledge and I wouldn&#x27;t trust it without a lot of peer review, but it&#x27;s something a competent crypto-understanding developer could pull off. Ordinary mortals can do things like combine a cipher with an authentication algorithm correctly if they take the time to study the state of the art and avoid previously understood pitfalls.<p>That&#x27;s <i>using</i> crypto as a developer. But this is <i>making</i> crypto.<p>Creating a <i>new cryptographic primitive</i> is serious deep ninja-god black magic voodoo stuff that is beyond mere mortals... and this is coming from someone who is very anti-elitist when it comes to most things like this. There&#x27;s not a huge pool of people I&#x27;d trust to attempt it, and even if it came from someone like DJB I still wouldn&#x27;t <i>use</i> it until it&#x27;s been in publication for at least a few years and attacked by many Ph.D&#x27;s and others. Salsa and ChaCha are some of the newest ciphers in common use and those are now... what... a decade old? And they&#x27;ve been beat up pretty badly by researchers too, so they&#x27;ve passed enough of a gauntlet to be trusted with something.<p>So even if they did this new curve, I wouldn&#x27;t use it for at least 5-10 years.<p>Edit:<p>The other thing I really don&#x27;t get is why a new venture like this would start off by trying to push an entire new curve. Unless there is some good reason <i>not</i> to trust C25519, there are many other more pressing concerns in the crypto world that could be tackled. We could really use good end-user crypto software that is solidly engineered and offers good UX. That would be of immensely more value than yet another ECC curve with no clear benefit over existing curves. (Other than maybe NIST but that&#x27;s another matter.)