Ledger Stax explained by Ian Rogers

Well I think I just got lucky. You know I was a kid who loved music and you know I guess loved culture because along with music comes all kinds of other things from like horror comics to horror movies I guess and skateboarding. And you know one thing that's important in my story is that I was always a lover of niche culture. So I grew up in a small town in Indiana where we didn't even have a record store. Yet I loved these things that were impossible to get even when you drove an hour to the record store. So what I had to do was to go near Notre Dame the university and buy a copy of Maximum Rock and Roll and then take it home and mail order to get what I wanted. So you know that was in the 80s. So in 1990 91 when I got to university and I got online this is pre-web but you know there were internet communities then that are really in many ways no different from Reddit or Discord today. But that was where I met people who liked the same music as me for the first time. So the internet to me was really just this place to kind of get what I wanted which I wasn't finding around me. And then I think that led me to a whole bunch of opportunities. I mean I studied computer science in the early 90s and it was really very difficult to stay in grad school in the mid 90s because there were so many jobs that you could get outside of the university. But I was lucky and just sort of fell into this slipstream of digital music from the very beginning when it was science fiction all the way through to the iPhone. Now what I became inadvertently with that was a student of how the internet is changing culture and I suppose more broadly maybe how technology changes culture because you're always looking for patterns and you're looking for you know the pattern first it's like is this similar to the pattern I saw last year and then now that I'm older it's okay how is what we're seeing in crypto similar to what we saw in the evolution of the internet. But then it encourages you to read more and especially being part of the music business I was always struck by the fact that we pretended like the music business had been around forever but really it had only been around for a few decades. So we always kind of wanted to go back to when things were better but then you gain some perspective and realize well wait a minute none of these things are divine these are all just industries that were created by people who came not too long before us and maybe change is actually the constant. So I think that's how I ended up here was loving culture loving music loving skateboarding and studying computer science and then just being lucky enough to put those two things together. You know the way I look at it we're all crazy in our own way and I've been really lucky and that the way that I'm crazy is valuable to someone. I love culture I love technology and I've managed to sort of put those things together and into a career which I mean I never even had any aspirations of having a career to be honest. But I thankfully I have passions and those passions have intersected with something that has become at least somewhat professional.

I think there's definitely something to that. I think I've been super lucky in that if I was somebody who loved mass culture I think the internet would have been like totally scary right. I knew a lot of those people as the music business was going from a $3 billion industry to a $15 billion industry they just wanted it to go back to the days of the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears and that was never my goal. My goal was actually to have people who love things that are niche have a more perfect marketplace in a way. And I think there is something really interesting in what you're saying about scarcity being some sort of inadvertent theme because I've always said that I remember when I saw Steve Caballero who's a skateboarder wear a Misfits t-shirt I think it took me two years after that to find an actual Misfits album and not for lack of looking. So but I think it's hard to imagine those days right when the entire world isn't at your fingertips when you didn't like just ask a question and immediately pick up your phone and type it into Google or YouTube or whatever and find the answer right. You know you actually had to go record store to record store asking people for these sorts of things. Now come all the way full circle on Discogs.com and by the way the Misfits were a very unpopular band that's why they were so hard to find they were not a mass market product by any means in the 80s. But now I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and I saw the Misfits skull on the Sunset Strip because I think they were playing a Halloween show at some casino. And a couple years ago on Discogs the most expensive album sold that year was a Misfits 7 inch that had sold for more than $10,000. So that notion of again the way that I frame what I've lived through is the internet is this revolution of information where information went from being locked behind gatekeepers whether that was FM radio or cable television or newspapers or magazine companies there were media gatekeepers and unless you owned some spectrum you didn't get access to talk to people right. To being completely unlocked like that's what the internet did fundamentally. Anyone can go register a domain and go I can be as big as Yahoo right. That's what the internet was all about. Now I think that we're into a separate revolution and that's a revolution of value. And I think you're right there's something about that combination of growing up wanting scarce information for scarce goods that sort of puts you in a position to understand first a revolution of information which ultimately leads to 6.5 billion smartphones on the planet right. So you have 6.5 billion people who have powerful computers with high-speed internet connection in their pockets and that creates this network of connectivity where information can travel but also value can travel right. And I think that's where we've landed. You know we're now and I a couple years ago certainly during the pandemic but even a bit before I started to realize that we were spending a lot of our time and attention in these borderless online worlds yet we are voting for our governments in these fundamentally geographic political regimes right. So the idea of democracy is you draw a line around some people on the Earth and then you get the people inside of that circle or whatever shape it is to elect somebody who represents their ideals. And I started to realize that that was increasingly difficult. Go back to Elkhart County Indiana which is as rich or rich poor and more diversity ethnically than it did when I was growing up. But also we live we spend our time and attention in these parallel universes in this borderless world the one you and I are in right now the one we're talking in right now we're not in the same physical location yet we are collaborating. And of course those worlds are going to have their own economies right. So we'll have not only the ability to interact in the way that we're doing right now over TCP/IP but we're also going to have the ability to transfer value over this and that will be outside of the government system it'll be a digital system.

I see an evolution that starts with Bitcoin and digital money and evolves to digital collectibles and then I would say digital utilities such as tickets and memberships and then I would say digital products like that digital replacement for the wristwatch and then ultimately we have digital passports right. I mean ultimately your government document is a digital document and the way that you move borders is you prove that you are the owner of the wallet that contains that document. And not only that but you can kind of federate the access to the information that's within that document right. If you are 22 years old and you go to a bar in Los Angeles they take your driver's license from you and they run it through a little machine which pulls way too much information about you personally more information than it needs to. The only thing you need to do is prove that you are of age to get into that club they don't need your personal information. And that's the kind of thing you'll be able to do with digital identity in the future. And I think these things are inevitable. But if we live in a world where digital assets are an important part of our life then we must have digital security right. Because if my wealth if my individuality if my belongings and ultimately my identity are represented by scarce digital goods right if the future of identity is ownership then I must have security around that ownership and I can't have hacks at scale. By the way the present of identity is ownership you know I during COVID I could go to the US and I could come back to Paris unlike many many many people because I owned two pieces of identification I had a US passport and I had a French work permit. Right and those two the ownership of those two documents allowed me to move those borders. Now the technology behind those two documents was not great on a relative basis and in the future we'll be better.

Sure and actually let me just pause on like why hardware matters. You know in technology there's no such thing as software without hardware right. So I think in often times in crypto we talk about like hardware wallets versus software wallets but the fact is software wallets run on hardware so we should really just focus on the hardware that those software wallets run on. And the reality is that if you don't have a secure element and you don't have a secure display then you don't have security period. So it's not about software wallet versus hardware wallet it's about the you know I mean look your phone is running an operating system and your Ledger is running an operating system. The question is do you have security within all of these elements within the chip within the path from the chip to the inputs and outputs and then inside of the operating system that this is running on do you have security. That's really the question to be asked. So for Ledger the focus has always been security and self-custody and security has always been by design right. The assumption is that everything can be hacked will be hacked and that reward dictates how much someone is willing to spend on an attack right. So if you have a centralized resource that's hosting billions in assets then you can afford to spend a lot to exploit that resource right. So you're always looking for by design and you're looking for ways that you can first of all decentralize so that if one node in the network is attacked it doesn't attack everyone in the network. And also you're looking for that resiliency to be anticipated up front right. Assume that the attack is coming you know you can't put a door behind a door behind a door behind a door behind a door behind a door and just say that's secure because it's going to be very hard to get through because if the prize behind all of those doors is big enough someone will get through all the doors. So you have to ask what are the other ways that you can mitigate an attack. And in the case of crypto it's actually beautiful because your value is secured by the network right. And that's the beauty of the blockchain. So you go okay well great I don't have to protect my value I do have to protect my key which shows I am the owner of that value. Okay well we've already massively simplified the challenge right because I don't have to protect all the gold bars I just have to protect the proof that those gold bars are mine. I can assume the gold bars are safe but I have to protect the proof that I am the owner of many of those gold bars. So the design of Ledger has always been in this way right how can you do two main and incredibly crucial things one protect your private keys from being exposed or stolen and two how do I know that when I'm signing a transaction I know what it is I'm signing knowing that to do that you must have a secure display a secure display that your computer and your phone don't have. So again this isn't about hardware versus software because your computer and your phone are hardware right. This is about doing crucial things with a secure display and about keeping crucial assets namely your private keys offline. So this is what Ledger's been doing for seven years and it started with the Nano S Nano X which added Bluetooth now Nano S+ which is basically the X minus the Bluetooth. So we basically took the same architecture as the X the same chip as the X with one added benefit that it's got better more developer friendly features the same screen as the X. So the S+ is really this fantastic device which for $80 gives you the world's best security. But I would say that the X and the S have one big shortfall and that is the screen is small and there's another which is not fatal but maybe unfortunate I would say and that is that they have the form factor of a USB stick which is quite convenient. I am known for wearing mine around my neck and it works very well. But the problem is that there's this mental hurdle that people have to get over with crypto which is and what they think is oh USB stick I know what that is you put stuff in it so that must be the place where I put my digital value. And it sort of becomes this blocker for people understanding how crypto works because they think oh my crypto lives in that device and then they think oh my God if I lose that device I'm screwed. And now they've just got the wrong mental model for the whole thing which is no your crypto is not in that device this is a device which keeps your private keys offline and shows you what you see as what you sign at the moment of signing but actually your value is safe on the blockchain. But I think that the form factor of the S and the X are great I love them I again I wear them around my neck I loved seeing it around Gunna's neck on the Met Ball I'll credit to Ari on that one it's another story we can tell another time. But really like that people want a bigger screen and a better form factor right.

It's exactly right. I mean the revelation that I had that led me to be here at Ledger today was back in 2018 and I was lucky that I was personal friends with Pascal Gauthier so that I was able to sort of think hard enough about this to have this revelation. Because what we're talking about right now is the thing that hit me like a ton of bricks in 2018 when I went oh my God like this company actually could be one of the big important companies of the next 20 years. And my thinking was wow digital assets are going to be this revolution and it's a revolution that's akin to the internet and it's actually separate from the internet. So I really don't like the term web 3 because it makes it seem like it's incremental to web 2 but it's not. You know it's like if you think about the technological revolutions of the last couple hundred years from industrialization to automotive to the Silicon chip certainly the internet and I believe that digital assets are a revolution that is on par with each of those. It's not a part of the internet revolution it's actually its own separate revolution. And I think that the net result of that as we just talked about is that digital assets play an important and kind of inextricable role in our lives. I mean I think this is another thing that people have a hard time with we like to think that we're these sovereign creatures and technology is this thing and we're in control of it. It's not true right. The fact that your water treatment your local water treatment facility probably runs on Windows 95 puts you and your family at risk right. You know like we can't separate ourselves from technology. And you experience that all the time just by the hassle of dealing with your phone company or whatever it is you have to deal with. And you realize that actually unplugging is incredibly difficult. And I think that this also just defies people's logic in so many ways. I mean I think I remember in 2000 when people thought the dot thing is over and the internet for geeks and this is never going to be a big part of life. But now it's almost like the people who are hustling are the people who use the internet the most right. I mean if you're riding a bike for Deliveroo here in Paris you're not a wealthy person and you need your cell phone more than almost anyone else in the city right. So this isn't technology isn't something that is just a luxury right it is a necessity for existing in the society that we've built. Now I'm not saying that's good or bad but I don't think you can deny it. And I think people really try to they have a discomfort with it they reject it and they deny it and it keeps them from seeing how new technologies will also become this inextricable part of our lives. I mean I suppose you could file your taxes in the US if you didn't have an internet connection but I think that it would be a lot harder than if you did. I think that the technology becomes the way you make an appointment at the doctor the way you make an appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles like this isn't like some fringe thing. So now when you think about okay digital assets are going to become that embedded in our lives right they're going to become that important to us okay that was where I went hold on a second if that's the case then the devices that we are using today are not the devices of the future period period right. And now like look back again people think like oh you know but by the way I remember people thinking oh no one will ever unseat MySpace right or oh Facebook is unassailable right now kids will tell you Facebook is for grandparents they've never heard of MySpace right these things have a way of going away. So if in 2002 I would have told you that the future kind of mobile revolution was going to be driven by the people who just made this MP3 player that came on the market you would have laughed at me and you would have said come on like Microsoft obviously has this on lock or maybe Nokia right. You know you never would have you know people forget like memory is fiction right. So there are very few people who either remember or would admit that they doubted Apple in 2002 but it was a $10 stock they had less than 2% market share. But there was this path from the iPod to the iPhone that was revolutionary and Microsoft trying to condense a personal computer and Windows into a phone was a massive failure. And I think you would have been hard pressed to find the people that would have picked the right horse in that race. So this is the context for me when I go wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute I think digital assets are a huge part of the future of humanity. I think that it's not even an opinion it's a fact the devices that we have on our desks and in our pockets cannot protect digital assets period right. So okay now which horse are you going to bet on are you going to bet on a secure device that has to become more full featured to become that secure digital asset device of the future or are you going to bet on the massive it does absolutely everything device somehow becoming more secure you know. I mean so that's I think the important I still haven't gotten to Stacks or the beauty of it I'm sorry.