CROWN STERLING▊
Organization dossier S.D.N.Y. docket 1:19-cv-07900 Status: still operating
The company that paid $115,000 to present "quantum AI encryption" at Black Hat, got heckled off the stage by working cryptographers — and then sued the conference and ten anonymous hecklers. The talk was music-based. The lawsuit was real.
the world's first dynamic 'non-factor' based quantum AI encryption software … using time, music's infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled key pairs
Crown Sterling, describing its TIME AI product in its own marketing materials (2019), as quoted by Bruce Schneier and The Register
We were assured by Black Hat and its public Code of Conduct that our presence would be treated openly and fairly. That did not happen.
COO Joseph Hopkins, in the company's statement announcing its lawsuit, per The Register
- ENTITY
- Crown Sterling Limited LLC, Newport Beach, California — self-described "leading digital cryptographic firm" FACT
- PRINCIPAL
- Robert Grant, founder & CEO — the company's public voice; the record below is the company's conduct, not a personal indictment FACT
- OPERATION
- "TIME AI" encryption · a quasi-prime preprint (arXiv 1903.08570) · later the Crown Sovereign (CSOV) token FACT
- THE DRAMA
- A $115K Black Hat talk, a room full of hecklers, a federal lawsuit against the conference and ten "Doe" defendants, and a live RSA-cracking "medicine show" the field reproduced before lunch
- RECORD
- No fraud adjudication, against the company or Grant, appears in this record. The rejection of its cryptography is expert opinion — loud, named, and unanimous in the sources below, but opinion. FACT
- STATUS
- STILL OPERATING — crownsterling.io is live; the token shipped; the archive keeps filming
This one is a company, not a person — and companies of this species speak through a single mouth, so the founder appears throughout. Keep the two distinct; this file does. What follows is the whole spectacle in order: the paper, the ballroom, the heckling, the lawsuit, the roadshow, the settlement, the pivot.
It is impossible for a normal human to keep track of what happened when. That is why the archive exists. Every beat below carries its receipt. Both sides get the microphone. You decide who wins.
the drama timeline
ACT I — THE PLUMAGE (MAR–AUG 2019)
Every display begins with the gathering of materials. This one gathers a preprint, a product name, and a four-minute video involving music. Watch what the field does with each.
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MAR 2019
The paper
Founder Robert Grant and physicist Talal Ghannam post "Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from Novel Quasi-Prime Analytical Methodology" to arXiv — a preprint server, distributed without peer review. This paper is the stated foundation of everything that follows.
-
2019
TIME AI, announced
The company announces TIME AI: "the world's first dynamic 'non-factor' based quantum AI encryption software," built on "multi-dimensional encryption technology, including time, music's infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled key pairs." The words are the company's own.
Note the materials: time, music, artificial intelligence. The field has seen many displays; it has not seen one made of these.
ACT II — THE BALLROOM (AUG 2019)
Las Vegas, high summer. The company has purchased the most expensive perch in the room. The room's residents are professionally suspicious of expensive perches. What happens next is on tape.
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AUG 2019
The $115,000 talk
Crown Sterling pays $115,000 for a Black Hat USA gold sponsorship, which buys a booth and a sponsored talk: "The 2019 Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does This Mean For Encryption?" The room boos and heckles. Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, confronts the presentation from the floor — "They're scamming people. They're here to use Black Hat to trick people into giving them money," he tells Gizmodo — and is removed from the room by conference security. To The Register he adds that the material "can't be found in the realm of reality."
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AUG 2019
Black Hat takes the talk down
Black Hat removes the sponsored talk from its website. A conference spokesperson says the organization is "aware of the situation" and will implement "a stronger vetting process moving forward to avoid this happening in the future."
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AUG 2019
The company sues the room
Crown Sterling files suit in the Southern District of New York against UBM, Black Hat's owner, alleging breach of the sponsorship agreement — and names up to ten "Doe" defendants. The complaint describes "a premeditated, orchestrated attack… staged by certain industry detractors and competitors" and a social-media "smear campaign."
The rarest maneuver in the repertoire, attempted at full extension: not merely suing the room, but reserving ten numbered seats for the hecklers.
ACT III — THE ROADSHOW (SEP 2019)
Denied one ballroom, the company rents another — a resort this time, with an invited audience. The demonstration is real, filmed, and public. So, within hours, are the laptops of everyone watching.
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SEP 19, 2019
The Pelican Hill demonstration
At the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach, before what a company spokesperson describes as roughly 100 academics and business professionals, Crown Sterling factors two 256-bit RSA keys in about 50 seconds each, live, and Grant claims 512-bit keys fall "in as little as five hours" on "standard computing." Ars Technica headlines it a "medicine show."
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SEP 2019
The field reproduces the trick before lunch
Schneier's ledger: 256-bit RSA "has never been considered secure" — too small even for the 1991 RSA Factoring Challenge — and 512-bit factoring matches a record set in 1999. Mark Carney, a PhD candidate at Leeds, factors larger numbers on his laptop in about 20 seconds with off-the-shelf Msieve; Henryk Plötz reproduces the 50-second result in Sagemath on an ultrabook; Jake Williams, ex-NSA TAO: "I'm dumber for having watched that… like bragging about hacking an unpatched Windows 2000 box." Schneier's standing challenge: "Find an RSA Factoring Challenge number that hasn't been factored yet and factor it."
Observe the immune response. No committee convenes, no ruling issues. The field simply opens its laptops and does the demonstration again, faster, for free, before the catering is cleared.
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SEP 2019
Grant answers
Pressed by Ars Technica, Grant says the demonstration's purpose was to show the vulnerability of the RSA algorithm, and that weak keys remain deployed in the wild: "Some banks still use DES encryption." The demonstration, he maintains, is therefore relevant.
ACT IV — THE SETTLEMENT AND THE PIVOT (2020–2021)
Litigation, like winter, ends quietly. And companies of this species do not die when a display fails. They molt.
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APR 2020
Confidential settlement — with a clarification
Crown Sterling and Informa Tech Holdings (formerly UBM) settle the suit confidentially. On the record, Informa states that "to its knowledge Crown Sterling's presentation was in compliance with Black Hat's Code of Conduct and its Sponsorship and Exhibitor Agreement." Both parties agree to say nothing further. No court ruled on anything; nobody admitted anything; the clarification is the only sentence that survives.
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JUL 2021
The token
Crown Sterling launches the MainNet of the Crown Sovereign (CSOV) token, marketed in its own announcements as "the world's first quantum-resistant digital asset," secured by "CrownEncryptOTP" — which the company calls "the first practical use case of One-Time Pad technology" — and built on the framework of the Polkadot blockchain. Exchange listings follow that autumn and winter.
The molt, completed. The word "encryption" remains; the words "RSA" and "TIME AI" do not. Colonies survive by shedding what the field has already eaten.
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EPILOGUE
Still operating
crownsterling.io is live. The paper remains on arXiv, uncorrected and unretracted. Schneier's challenge number remains unfactored on the public record. The archive keeps the tape running.
both sides, on the record
The experts' rejection (theirs, not ours): Schneier — "complete and utter snake oil," and "Grant has no cryptographic credentials"; Aumasson — "snake oil crypto," the paper's content "either obvious, well-known mathematical properties… or plain wrong"; Guido, from the ballroom floor — "They're scamming people" [5] [8] [9].
The reproduction: the headline demonstration — factoring 256-bit RSA — was matched or beaten within a day by named researchers using free tools on laptops; the key size predates the 1991 RSA Factoring Challenge's floor, and the 512-bit claim matches a 1999 record [6] [7].
The documented conduct: when the field rejected the claims, the company's answer was a federal lawsuit against the conference's owner and up to ten anonymous hecklers — a filing, on a public docket, that is not in dispute [1] [8].
The company's position, in its own words: it presented legitimate, disruptive research; it "anticipated a degree of pushback from industry participants and competitors"; it was "assured by Black Hat and its public Code of Conduct" of fair treatment and did not receive it; it attended "in good faith, strictly adhering to the Black Hat stipulations" [8]. Grant's stated purpose for the factoring demo: to show RSA's vulnerability while weak keys — and, he says, even DES at some banks — remain deployed [6].
Its strongest card is on the record: in the April 2020 settlement, Informa — the counterparty it sued — stated that to its knowledge Crown Sterling's presentation complied with Black Hat's Code of Conduct and the sponsorship agreement [2] [3]. The company published its methods openly: the paper sits on arXiv under the founder's name for anyone to shred [4].
Scope of the record: the rejection of its cryptography is expert opinion — expert, named, and unrebutted by any factored challenge number, but opinion. No court, no regulator, and no adjudication has found fraud by the company, and nothing on this page alleges any personal wrongdoing by Robert Grant. The company operates today; the token shipped [11] [12].
YOU DECIDE
Scoped to the claims, never the company — and never the man. The claim "this technology threatens modern encryption" lost its argument on the public record: the demonstration factored key sizes the field retired before 1991, named experts rejected the mathematics in print, and Schneier's challenge — factor one number nobody has factored — sits unanswered. The claim "Black Hat wronged Crown Sterling" ended in a confidential settlement with Informa's compliance clarification on the record — a sentence that reads in the company's favor, and it stays on this page at full strength. Nothing here is adjudicated. Nothing here is a fraud finding.
Weigh the costly signals: the company paid $115,000 for the room, then paid its lawyers when the room laughed. The field's rebuttal cost a lunch break and a laptop. The one experiment that would end the argument — an unfactored challenge number, factored — has been priced, publicly, since September 2019. It remains unbought.
The archive does not judge. The archive merely keeps the tape running.
evidence locker
PRIMARY RECORD
Crown Sterling Limited LLC v. UBM LLC a/k/a Black Hat USA, S.D.N.Y. 1:19-cv-07900 (CourtListener docket) FACT — the filing, on the public docket.
courtlistener.com/docket/16101639/… arXiv 1903.08570 — "Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from Novel Quasi-Prime Analytical Methodology" (Grant & Ghannam) SELF-PUBLISHED — the foundational paper, unretracted; a preprint, never peer-reviewed.
arxiv.org/abs/1903.08570
EXPERTS & PRESS
Ars Technica — "Medicine show: Crown Sterling demos 256-bit RSA key-cracking at private event" (Sep 2019) ATTRIBUTED — the Pelican Hill demo; Carney, Plötz, and Williams; Grant's defense interview.
arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/… The Register — "Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it" (Aug 2019) ATTRIBUTED — the $115K, the complaint's language, the Doe defendants, Guido's removal, Aumasson, and the Hopkins statement.
theregister.com/2019/08/26/black_hat_sued/
SUBJECT'S OWN CHANNELS — THE COMPANY, UNEDITED
crownsterling.io SELF-PUBLISHED — the operation, still open for business.
crownsterling.io
The standard. Everything above is sourced to a federal docket, the parties' own settlement announcement, the company's own publications, and named expert and press commentary. Facts are stated as facts; expert rejection is stated as expert rejection and wears its expert. The company is distinguished from its founder, the settlement is distinguished from an adjudication, and the defense — including the counterparty's own clarification in the company's favor — is presented at full strength. No motive is asserted, no fraud is alleged, no private character diagnosed. The burden of proof is on us, not the subject. If it couldn't survive a defamation challenge, it wouldn't be on this page.