Hello, welcome! This is Blockchain Blo, the blockchain educator. I'm AA Pink, and I have a very special guest today here with me, Mr. Pascal Gauthier, the CEO of Ledger. Pascal, thank you very much for your time.
I would like to take the opportunity to talk about Ledger and many other things in security when it comes to crypto, because this is what Ledger is really standing for. You're actually not just the CEO of Ledger, but you're also a non-executive chairman of Kaiko, if that's correct. It's a data provider company for blockchain data.
Yeah, I think I'm only a board member now at Kaiko. Over the time, I started as CEO, then non-executive chairman, and now I think I'm only a board member.
Only, okay. But we're still very happy, and Emilie is the CEO and she's doing a key job to make Kaiko the best data company in the space.
And you're actually having a restaurant as well, is that correct?
Correct, yes. I mean, I think the restaurant has been going on for eight years now, and it's something that I did while I was building Kaiko at the time because the market was so slow and I'm not a developer, so I had a lot of time on my hands and nothing to sell, nothing to pitch. And so I always wanted to build a restaurant. It's not something that I bought or invested in; it's something that I built myself with a friend. So we did it. I had time, so I built Kaiko and the restaurant at the same time. And as well, I was a venture partner at Mosaic Ventures in London, so I was doing all these things at the same time. And in '17, with the bull run, I just focused on Bitcoin and Ledger.
But the reason why I mentioned these things is that you're doing so many things at the same time. For those of you who don't know your professional path that well, can you please update them—how did you get to Ledger, what did you do before professionally, and also how did you meet crypto? When did you get into crypto?
Yeah, so it was at the same time that I was building Kaiko. When you build a company, the statistics of failure are not good for any entrepreneur—it's more sure that you're going to fail than succeed. I knew nothing about crypto, nothing about finance, nothing about coding, so I thought my chances of failure were pretty high. I thought, I'm also going to invest in others, so even if I fail at my company, maybe others will succeed. In investing with others, I will learn. When I touched Bitcoin in 2014, I thought data was missing—hence Kaiko and the data company. But security was missing as well. The security of the private key. What struck me while reading the whitepaper was that there was nothing said about what do you do with your private keys. Suddenly you have this entropy, those 24 words, and if you want to hold Bitcoin yourself because it's a peer-to-peer network, what do you do with the private keys? So I met this team in Paris in late 2014 called Ledger. They were doing a seed round, and I decided to invest. Little did I know, because I invested very fast. I said, I'm going to put a significant investment in and I want a board seat. So they said yes very quickly, because nobody wanted to touch Bitcoin at the time, let alone Bitcoin and hardware. Apparently I led the seed round because everybody seeing me investing so quickly thought that I knew something. I didn't know anything. I just knew that the market needed security, and that chip-and-pin technology, right, that Ledger uses, is the best line of defense to protect cryptographic secrets. And so here we are.
Talking about Ledger, so what is actually Ledger's mission on the market?
Look, we are a cybersecurity company, and we don't compromise on security so you don't have to compromise either as a consumer or an enterprise on security. In this market, from the beginning, there's been this weird attitude of always compromising on something. Whether you compromise on self-custody or custody, you're like, oh well, I'm going to custody my coin with someone, which defeats the purpose of crypto. If not self-custody, if not private property, why crypto? Why do you need Bitcoin if it's to put Bitcoins at the bank? I'm not saying that banks shouldn't exist. But the fact is that Bitcoin was designed to be a peer-to-peer system, so people compromise on private property and ownership, and people compromise on security. Today, anything that's built on top of your computer or your phone is not safe. We know this very instinctively because we've been hacked so many times through our phones and computers. It's because the operating system is not a security operating system. The phones and computers have not been designed to be secure hardware, and so you can attack the phone and computer via the operating system. Everything that sits on top of it can be easily broken. We've all heard the stories.
So what Ledger has done really is—I've got the new device here, the Ledger Stax—and we're going to talk about that. It's a device that not only secures your private key with chip-and-pin technology—there is a secure element in this, just like the one on your credit card—but also that secure element has an operating system that is the only secure operating system in the world that is proprietary to Ledger. That operating system connects to the blockchain protocols but also controls the screen and the touchscreen. So therefore, this is the only device in the world that has full security, not compromising on security, where the secure element controls everything all the way from the screen. So what you see here is actually true reality. If you're going to send anything, Bitcoin or Ethereum, somewhere, you have to sign it here.
Because one of the dangers is blind signing, where you don't even know what you are signing. In the older devices, you didn't have the ability to see it clearly. But now with this one, if I'm right, clear signing is possible and you see everything.
