Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet: Zero-Day Vulnerability Prices Have Dropped to Zero, AI Disrupts Security Economics
Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet pointed out that the price of zero-day vulnerabilities has fallen to zero, with some being publicly disclosed for free on GitHub.
Previously, high-value vulnerabilities were seven-figure assets, and the market relying on brokers, custody, and warranties was built on the high cost of discovery. Now, the collapse of discovery costs has led to a marginal value approaching zero.
In market mechanisms, security researchers and hackers no longer hoard vulnerabilities but instead opt for immediate public disclosure. Funding is shifting from traditional vulnerability brokerage and defense services to cryptography-native security solutions. Event-driven AI lowers the threshold for attacks, benefiting companies that provide provable execution, hardware trust, and validity proof, while traditional systems relying on a "sufficiently secure" patch strategy are under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Charles Guillemet, as Ledger CTO, has long focused on hardware wallet security, promoting hardware-level protection during various industry security incidents and advocating for architecture designs that reduce reliance on third-party trust within the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem.
Capital pathways indicate that funding in the security field is shifting from software patches and response services to building cryptographic infrastructure. Companies are reallocating resources by investing in zero-knowledge proofs and hardware security modules to strategically address the collapse of attack costs driven by AI, transitioning from passive defense to actively unbreachable systems.
Similar to the evolution from firewalls to encrypted communications in the early internet era, the current state of crypto and blockchain security is at a critical stage of transitioning from "economic security" to "mathematical security."
Essentially a technological substitution, the mechanism lies in AI significantly lowering the cost of vulnerability discovery, breaking the previous asymmetric balance of "difficult discovery = relative security," and forcing the entire security industry chain to reconstruct around cryptographic primitives and verifiable computation, with pricing power shifting to protocols and hardware providers that can offer mathematically impossible attack solutions.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Scarcity creates defense, abundance destroys barriers; zero cost flips the security paradigm.
Patching is a temporary fix, cryptography is a lifelong solution; trust assumptions determine survival boundaries.
Attackers burn vulnerabilities, defenders build the impossible; AI renders economics ineffective, mathematics reshapes the rules.