Let's get some facts. 37% of you aren't subscribed to this channel. That's almost four out of 10, just freeloading the alpha. So come on, hit subscribe, and I promise to keep leveling up the show with the best guests and the juiciest insight. Go on, do it now. Hi everyone. We're back again at Breakpoint 2025 in Abu Dhabi. And now we're joined by Ian Rogers, chief experience officer at Ledger. Ian, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing today?
I'm great. It's great to be here.
Absolutely. You know, this conference, the energy is just so contagious and just feeling all the bullishness in the air. You know, we're about almost half a little over halfway through the first day. How's your experience been here so far?
I mean, they put on a great show. It's Breakpoint. I felt this in Singapore last year. I was like, wow, this reminds me actually of going to E3, you know, the big video game conference in LA in the late 90s. Like, that's what it feels like. It feels like to me Breakpoint feels like the only conference in crypto that feels like a consumer centric event. You know, they actually understand marketing that feels consumer and culturally relevant.
Yeah. And you see that kind of in the apps that people use on Solana. And it just does feel very consumer focused and like they really had that in mind when they were designing a lot of the things they're building. I want to kind of talk to you big picture. What are your expectations for crypto in 2026 and beyond? Or what would you like to see coming from crypto in the future?
Well, I mean obviously this cycle has been so much different than the cycle we had in 2021. In 2021 we had a lot of things that were very much about self-custody, DeFi, NFTs. This time has been very much about this convergence of TradFi and crypto. I think every industrial transformation comes with speculation, overinvestment, bubble, and then you get 30 years of sustained growth. For me, we are very much in that 30 years of sustained growth phase where things will look maybe a bit more boring. Like what we're talking about yield on stablecoins, that's maybe a less exciting narrative than the to the moon narratives we had in 2021. But that's also sustainable. You can really see how you go, for example with Ledger, with Ledger Wallet, you can go easily from your bank account to your Ledger. That's boring, but you can't take it for granted. You couldn't do that in 2021. When you tried to fund an account, your credit card would get denied, your bank would say no, it's crypto. Now you can literally just set up a payee in your bank account, do a transfer, and boom, it lands in USDC or USDT in your Ledger. Is that incredibly sexy? I don't know, but I think it is. It's very basic but it works. The fact that you can easily transfer, you can easily get yield whether that's on Solana by staking or on your USDT through DeFi protocols, and you can easily spend it on something like the Ledger credit card. That is just a replacement for your bank and your traditional finance account, but it's global, it's fast, it's at the speed and cost of crypto rails, not banking rails. To me, this is where we are now. If you think about when Ledger was started 11 years ago, it was for one thing, this long-term risk asset called Bitcoin. Now today it's for every asset: Bitcoin, Solana, tokenized stocks, every kind of investment. It's also a yield bearing savings account and a spending account with the CL card attached to your Ledger. In crypto, unless the numbers are going up, we feel sad, but when you look in the rearview mirror, we've accomplished so much. We're in such a different place than we were in 2021. I think we need to stop and appreciate it for a second.
That's such a great point to make. And boring isn't always a bad thing. We're seeing that as things have gotten more boring, adoption really starts to pick up and institutions get more interested. I think that was important to say.
Look, we came into this to fix something. When it works well, it will be boring. I started doing digital music in the early 90s and it was science fiction. Now you can say 'Hey Siri, play the Beatles' and the Beatles come out of your phone. That's kind of boring, but for me it's incredible. The idea that you might someday be able to do that when I started in the early 90s was just like, come on, no one would believe you. Now we take it for granted. I think we should look forward to when it's super easy to move money here to there and you're not thinking about what network it's on. It's easy to just tap and pay and you're not thinking about the network on the other side. We just did a test in the Ledger booth where somebody bought a Ledger Nano Gen 5 using Zcash. It was scan, send, confirm, buy. It was sending Zcash on ETH, converted on the fly, landing in the other wallet. It just works. That's an amazing place to be. We weren't there five years ago.
Absolutely. I want to touch on that because you said we tend to take these things for granted. One thing we do take for granted is security. We're so used to putting our money in a bank, never thinking about it. But with crypto, self-custody is a big thing and we tend to take security for granted. Now with AI coming fast, digital identity is becoming really important. How do you think about digital identity in this AI era?
First of all, people shouldn't take security for granted. We're in that business where we see people who take it for granted until they get wrecked and then they try to retrace their steps. I encourage everyone to think about it now, not later. Your bank account isn't super easy to use. Try to transfer me $50,000 from your bank account right now. It won't work because they can't be sure that you are you. To raise the limit on my bank account in Europe, I have to go into the branch because there's no phone, app, or website where they can be sure I'm me unless I show up in person. That's the security we're used to. Everyone knows passwords are a disaster. Security is fundamentally borked. You either have bad password hygiene or use a password manager. Even with good hygiene, it's not easy. Then you have 40 different 2FA methods. At Ledger, we exist to solve this, not only for crypto but broadly. Our computers and phones were built to share stuff, not protect anything. If you want to protect value—crypto, password, identity—you need something built for security. That's what a Ledger device is. On AI: AI gives us digital abundance, crypto gives us digital scarcity. AI can pretend anything, including impersonating you. Security becomes more important. It's not only security but retaining your identity. The right word is proof. Blockchain is a method for proof of ownership, but you also need proof of identity, proof that my voice is coming out of this microphone and wasn't edited. When you're watching this, you don't know it's me. Ultimately we will need that proof, especially for important things. We're seeing fake news—a fake bridge collapse in London stopped trains because of a fake image. Proof is crucial. There's no way to know from a phone when an operating system can be owned. Unless you have a device built for security, you don't have security and you don't have proof.
Now transitioning on security, because the more people we get into crypto, the more security becomes a topic. What do you think drives adoption for that individual user of a security device? What makes them think 'I need a hardware wallet'?
