A few days ago during the Blockchain Week Rome, The Cryptonomist had the chance to interview Pierre Langlet, Senior Technical Account Manager at Ledger, the French company of the well-known hardware wallet Ledger Nano.
In addition to the hardware wallet, how is the plan involving the custody service going?
Yes, we do. At the beginning of this year we released what we call the Ledger Vault, a self custody solution for financial institutions and crypto exchanges and offering the same security grade as our hardware wallet devices
On top of this unique security solution, the financial institutions are able to build their own flexible governance rules to respond to their internal policies Indeed, they need to be sure that they can split responsibilities between people and mitigate the risk on how they will be able to operate on the different wallets thanks to multi layer of approvals, and multi authorization per layer.
Regarding the service of custody, this is today not the way we want to go. Ledger it’s a tech company and we focus on what we do best: the security of our client’s crypto assets.
Instead, we announced last year a Joint Venture with the Japanese bank Nomura, for which Ledger will provide the technical stack of the custody solution, while Nomura will take care of the financial and custody services.
Do you think you will support Libra and integrate it in the wallet?
That’s a good question and it has created a lot of excitement at Ledger last week. It has been pretty well received by the crypto community, but not only, so this is definitely something that we will look at. Now it’s a little bit too recent to have a very straightforward point and opinion on this.
Our technical team will deep dive into the whitepaper, into what we need to implement first, but yes this is definitely something we’ll look at. Again, our main purpose in Ledger is to provide solution to secure our client crypto assets.
What’s your opinion about the project?
I think it’s really great because it will provide much more visibility and credibility towards projects built on top of blockchain technology. Last year we had Telegram, who announced an ICO to provide the same kind of services, being able to pay and transfer money over the Telegram application, Facebook will be pretty much the same as I understood.
Facebook represents 2.5 billions of users, Telegram around 250 million, it will converge people that are not crypto-oriented to this kind of use cases.
And what’s your opinion on stablecoins?
We have a lot of requests coming from many of the institutional investors, because they want to reduce their risk in these very volatile markets, and in Ledger, whatever the stablecoin is backed by, fiat currency, cryptocurrency or even commodities, on all sides it’s a coin that needs to be secured, and this is the area of action of Ledger, securing that kind of tokens.
After the Binance hack, you said you recorded a peak of sales of the Ledger devices, how is it going now?
We did, but there’s always a couple of factors that could explain the boost of the sales. At the same moment, we had better market capitalisation and valuation, and we also released the Nano X in April, so I think it’s a combo of those three factors. What we can see from the past experience, whenever we have better crypto market valuation,, what was not enough in the past to invest in our devices, can be now. So it means that the state of the market capitalisation is definitely a factor in our sales.
And what’s the future, what are the plans for the future of Ledger?
It’s really bright thanks to projects such as Libra and Telegram, but also having now major institutions looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects. We forecast that those projects will be more and more mainstream and securing blockchain entry points will always be a key subject.
Mainly want to develop our 3 business units in paralele:
We want to capitalise on our Nano X hardware wallet, which has been really well received from our community, and we also plan to deliver more features on the Ledger Live
On the Ledger Vault, we have amazing projects to deliver this year and a lot of opportunities coming from financial institutions and crypto exchanges.
And on IOT side, we want to develop and expand our offerings on securing the communication of connected objects as this will represent a huge market in the near future.
