Making Crypto Ready for Everyone - Ian Rogers (Ledger)

Thank you for having me. Hi everybody. How many people here have a Ledger? Okay, so I don't need to tell you what it is. Thank you. That's great to start with, I would say.

I grew up in Indiana, started with computers at eight, loved technology and culture. I learned about Bitcoin early but looked at it through a digital media lens. I was part of the Napster team, but saw you couldn't build a business on copyright infringement. So when I saw Bitcoin in 2009, I thought it was amazing but difficult to build a real business on, because crypto threatens state sovereignty. I didn't buy any. Around 2014-2015, two things happened: Bitcoin felt big enough that game theory was on, and I moved to Paris to work for LVMH. There I met Pascal Gauthier, the first seed investor in a little French company called Ledger, and Tony Fadell. We hatched a plan to move Ledger from B2G (business to geek) to true B2C. Without all those things piling up, I wouldn't be at Ledger.

For me, it always felt obvious that the internet would have its own money. I started building on the internet in 1990, and the pain of credit card integration made me see the need. But the aha moment for Tony Fadell and me was during COVID. The technology that was a promise in 2017 was real in 2020, and with two trillion in US stimulus, it was inevitable. That was the moment: it's here, now is the time.

I think the most significant thing said this year is SEC Chair Paul Atkins saying self-custody is a right for Americans. He is correct. Without property rights, you don't have freedom. We live digital lives, and if the move from God to state to network over 500 years is correct, then you must have digital property rights. If not self-custody, why crypto? We are not building the next PayPal; we are building something fundamentally different. Permissionless money is crucial.

I think we are approaching mainstream, but maybe not what people thought in 2021. The internet has fundamental brokenness in passwords. Web 3 is powerful because you log in with your own credentials and own your preferences. The 2021-22 cycle was about DeFi and NFTs and marketing. This cycle looks more like mainstream adoption with tradi and crypto mingling. For the user, it will be invisible. The 3% merchant tax from credit rails will be replaced by digital cash settlement. Almost everyone with a smartphone will use crypto rails, just as the internet digitized information, crypto will digitize value.