Ledger's Ian Rogers: New Touchscreen Wallets, Crypto vs. TradFi, and Why NFTs Aren't Done!

Are we about to leak something live stream? You know, we had our big announcement in October. So we are now spreading the gospel on what we announced. It was a lot: a new device, Ledger Nano Gen 5, new features for Ledger Wallet, and Ledger Multisig.

Yeah. So these are three different touchscreen ledgers. People are familiar with the Ledger Nano. I joke it's like the Air Jordan of crypto. Pressing okay with two thumbs isn't mainstream. We started with the Ledger Stax, our first e-ink touchscreen with a unique organic TFT, the world's only curved e-ink touchscreen. It was like the Tesla Roadster. Tony Fadell had the idea: a ledger should denote value, be credit-card sized, and you stack value. Also, users often have more than one and want to personalize them. The e-ink screen is great for that. But it's expensive, so we made the Ledger Flex with a more traditional e-ink screen. This is the Solana edition. I announced it at Accelerate in May. The Flex I announced at Bitcoin Nashville last year with Kid Rock. The Stax is a $400 product. The Flex we got to $250. We wanted to bring the better UI to the Nano X price point, so we worked with Tony and made the Ledger Nano Gen 5, also e-ink touchscreen, announced in October. It's $179, meant to upgrade those with the button interface. Especially as you use it daily, you want a touchscreen. We also did cool charms. We collaborated with Susan K, who designed the original Mac icons. She designed these initial charms. More in the future: you can get badges for your favorite tokens.

Correct. These all support Bluetooth. You have your phone in your left hand and your Ledger in your right. In Ledger Wallet, you can see balances, staked earnings. With the Ledger CL card, you transfer value in. That's why we call this a secure element, not just a wallet. It's a better way, because this is the worst year for hacks. Your phone was designed to share information, not protect value. You need a device built ground-up to protect value. When it's time to sign, your private key is protected inside a secure element with a secure screen. If you don't have a secure screen, you have no better security than on your phone.

The reality is, what amount of money are you not comfortable losing? If that's $100, then you shouldn't have $100 in a hot wallet. Your value is safe on the blockchain, but your private key must always be protected. There's zero reason to have a private key in a software wallet. I have a Ledger connected to my Phantom wallet. But you still need to be careful at transaction time. You can sign a bad transaction. So it's good to segregate wallets. For me, both my everyday and long-term wallets are hardware. I have some wallets I don't even have physical access to.

You can walk into Best Buy and buy a Ledger Nano S Plus for $49. So if it's more than $49, you might as well use a hardware wallet. It depends on the individual. Some people $5,000 is all they have; others could lose $5,000 and not notice. Also, there's psychology: people say they'll set it up tomorrow. So I say use a hardware wallet from the jump. Once you get hacked, you'll use one for everything. There's a story of a guy who had all his money on FTX, and a colleague made him set up his Ledger. A month later, FTX melted down. So don't wait. Set it up today. Also, the new Ledger Recovery Key comes with touchscreen devices. It's a plastic square that's an electronic PIN-protected backup of your seed phrase. You should still write down your seed, but the recovery key prevents misspelling. Devices are getting easier to use. Ledger started as Bitcoin-only, but now it supports all assets, tokenized stocks, real-world assets, yield-bearing accounts. With our partnership with Noah, you can send fiat into your Ledger as USDC and then swap, stake, connect to dApps. It's a different world than a year ago.