Crunchfish receives Swedish patent for quantum-safe offline payments
Crunchfish Digital Cash AB (“Crunchfish”) has received an intention to grant of a patent with no. 546 770 from Swedish Patent and Registration Office (PRV) protecting quantum-resistant security provisions for an offline digital payment. This innovation makes Crunchfish Digital Cash resistant to attacks by quantum computing, keeping payment information secure even after large-scale quantum computers have become available. The patent is valid until March 2042.
The advent of large-scale quantum computing offers great promise to science and society but brings also significant threats to the global information infrastructure. Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI), widely used on the internet today, relies upon cryptography that is believed to be secure given the computational power currently available. However, popular cryptographic schemes, including RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography, will be easily broken by a quantum computer. This will rapidly accelerate the obsolescence of our currently deployed security systems and will have dramatic impacts on any industry, including payments, where information needs to be kept secure.
This patented innovation is based on combining two different data integrity schemes and offers a new paradigm for offline payments that addresses the challenges which can be expected in the era of quantum computing. A two-step process is applied. Offline payments are first negotiated by short-range data communication using a cryptographic hash operation or symmetric cryptography with a shared secret followed by online synchronization by broadband communication using quantum-safe asymmetric cryptography.
All information that is transmitted on public channels is vulnerable to eavesdropping. Encrypted data can also be stored for later decryption once quantum computing becomes available. Bitcoin is one example where previously made transactions are accessible by anyone and puts a substantial amount of Bitcoin at risk. Even if large-scale quantum computers are still a few years into the future, preparations must be made now, as the timing when technical innovation leapfrogs is hard to predict.
“We are extremely happy that yet another innovation has been deemed patentable. It strengthens Crunchfish leadership in offline payments by making Digital Cash safe for quantum computing attacks. It solves a key problem that must be addressed in the advent of quantum computing”, says Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish.
The patent has priority from a Swedish patent application no. 22050413-8 filed in March 2022. It has previsouly received a positive international preliminary report on patentability (IPRP) during the PCT-phase and recently been nationalized in Europe, USA, India and Brazil.
For more information, please contact:
Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB
+46 708 46 47 88
joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com
This information is such information as Crunchfish AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, at 15:45 CET on January 21st, 2025.
Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.
About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com
Crunchfish is a deep tech company developing a device-agnostic generic trusted client application platform for offline payments, tokenized card payments as well as other mobile client / server systems. Crunchfish has been listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market since 2016, with headquarters in Malmö, Sweden and with a subsidiary in India.
