Keep Your Crypto Safe | Pascal Gauthier - Chairman & CEO of Ledger

No, we've seen people understand money, and they don't want to lose their money. So now a lot of people lose money, but after FTX, it's like when you burn yourself, you don't touch the flame anymore. So FTX was the big earthquake, I think much bigger than you know Mt. Gox or all of these things that happened in the past. And by the way, they keep on happening and they will keep on happening. FTX was not the last, the same way that Lehman Brothers was not too big to fail. It's like, why would you trust a central authority with your money? I mean, exchanges are very useful, you should use them to do the trade, but you should never leave your coins on an exchange. And so I think people understand that, and we've seen this in our numbers. It was a hard way to learn, but it was a way. And you see it in the coins moving from exchanges to somewhere else. And we see a lot of coins moving to our platform, and then we see a lot more people now are engaging with the services that we have in Ledger Live, especially the buy, sell, and swap services. The numbers are very impressive, you know, triple digit growth, very constant in Q1, continuing in Q2 when the market is definitely not doing triple digit growth. No, not at all. So you see, you're not even taking over people that are very adamant crypto users, you still are bringing people in that have never used crypto before, even in a transaction thing. What I'm describing is more like our user base now understands that they can do more with Ledger than just store the crypto, and they prefer to do the trades from the Ledger rather than from the exchange. Understood.

Oh yeah, for sure. And actually more and more. Well, first of all, before in 2017 it was not possible, so you had to do Coinbase first and then Ledger second. In 2023 now, first of all, it's not just cryptocurrencies, but it's also NFTs. So sometimes you enter through an NFT and not really through crypto. You can go on OpenSea, take your credit or debit card, Moon Pay is providing the service, and then you buy your NFT and then you have to put it somewhere. And actually through the payment service, Moon Pay will ask you where do you want to put it, and so it could be on your MetaMask, could be on your Ledger, etc. And so yes, more and more. Actually, what we've seen in 2022, when everybody was saying it was a bear market, we saw that sure on certain things, certain things were not flying as high as they would have in the past, but other things like the NFT business and those communities being built around those projects kept on growing, and so that brought a lot of people in, that brought a lot of Ledgers. And what do you know, now again you see people that are older crypto users as well as new crypto users using Ledger for all the transactions they want to take care of.