Hello, welcome. This is Blockchain Bloom, 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.
Pleasure. And yeah, I would like to take the opportunity to talk about Ledger and many other things, and 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. You know, it's a data provider company for blockchain data.
I think I'm only a board member now at Kaiko. I think over the time I was, 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 Sub is the CEO and she's doing a kick-ass job to make Kaiko the best data company in the space, right? And you actually have 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. I had nothing to sell, nothing to pitch, and so I always wanted to build a restaurant. So it's not something that I bought or it's not something that I invested in, it's something that I built myself with a friend. And so we did it, you know, I had time, so I built Kaiko and the restaurant at the same time. And as well, I was an investor, I was a venture partner at Mosaic Ventures in London, so I was doing all these things at the same time. And in '17, I, you know, with the boom, I just focused on Bitcoin and Ledger.
But the reason why I mentioned these things, this background, was that because you're doing so many things actually at the same time. Okay, but for those of you who don't know your professional path that well, can you just please, you know, update them. How did you get to Ledger? What did you do, you know, before professionally, and also how did you meet crypto? So 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. You know, it's more sure that you're going to fail than you're going to succeed. And so I knew nothing about crypto, I knew nothing about finance, I knew nothing about coding. So I thought that my chances of failure were pretty high. And so I thought to myself, look, I'm going to also invest, and also I was investing at the time, and I thought to myself, I'm also going to invest in others. So even if I fail my company, maybe others will succeed. And in investing with others, I will learn. And when I touched Bitcoin was in '14, you know, I thought that data was missing, hence Kaiko and the data company, but security was missing as well. You know, the security of the private key. What struck me while reading the white paper was that there was nothing said about, like, you know, what do you do with your private keys? Like, you know, suddenly you have this entropy and, you know, those 24 words, and you know, but if you want to hold Bitcoin yourself because it's a peer-to-peer network, then what do you do with the private keys? And so I met this team in Paris late '14 called Ledger, and they were doing a seed round, and I decided to invest. And little did I know, because I invested very fast and I said, look, I'm going to put a significant investment and I want a board seat. So they said yes very quickly because nobody wants to touch Bitcoin at the time, and let alone Bitcoin and hardware, crazy. And so 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, you know, the market needed security, and that the chip and pin technology that Ledger uses is the best line of defense to protect cryptographic secrets. And so here we are, right, and 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, you know. Whether you compromise on self-custody or custody, you're like, oh well, you know, I'm going to custody my coin with someone, which defeats the purpose of crypto. You know, if not self-custody, if not private property, why crypto? Like, you know, why do you need Bitcoin if it's to put your Bitcoins at the bank? I'm not saying that, you know, banks shouldn't exist, I'm saying, okay, 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. You know, today anything that's built on top of your computer or your phone is not safe. We know this, we know this very instinctively because we've been hacked so many times through our phones and computer. And why? 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, and so everything that sits on top of it can be easily broken. And we all heard the stories. And so what Ledger has done really is, and I got, you know, the new device here with many Ledger Stacks, we're going to talk about that for sure. Yeah, so it's a device that not only secures your private key with that, you know, sort of chip and pin technology, there is a secure element into this just like the one that you have 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. And that operating system connects to the blockchain protocols, but also controls the screen and the touch screen. And so therefore, you know, this is the only device in the world that has full security, not compromising on security, and where the secure element controls everything all the way from the screen. So what you see here is actually truth, reality. So if you're going to send anything, Bitcoin or Ethereum, somewhere, you have to sign it here, right? Because one of the dangers is when it comes to blind signing, you know, in the past, because you don't even know what you are signing. And in these older devices, you actually didn't have the ability to see it clearly. But now with this one, if I'm right, then clear signing is possible and you see everything then basically.
Well, clear signing was always possible with any of the Ledger devices, but you know what we are really striving for here with this new generation of devices is the ease of use, you know. And so with a bigger screen, it's easier to display something, you have more space, you know, it's more clean, like, you know, for people to understand what they're signing, they don't have to look at, you know, five different screens, if you see what I mean. Why? Because the previous ones were smaller, smaller screens, of course. And so really the upgrade here is really UX and UI, the user experience and the user interface. It's so much greater. It doesn't mean that, you know, the older products like, you know, Nano S Plus and X that we're still selling today, they're still very good products. And also for these products, we are trying to maximize the user experience. But this is truly an upgrade in terms of ease of use. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm using it myself, and every time I'm using it, I get this feeling of finally, you know, finally, like finally a hardware wallet that's been designed for the general audience, for the consumer market, for people that are not necessarily crypto experts. But even the crypto experts will be delighted by this product because it's just easier to use. It's just nice.
Yeah, because one issue I think crypto is facing is how to get really mainstream. And with these a bit more complicated devices, a lot of people are kind of locked out because they sometimes feel that, oh, this is just too much for me. So as soon as you be getting to the level, for example, with this one, when it's, you know, much easier and user-friendly, more people will be open-minded and then open up for self-custody. Because in many cases, it's just pure comfort while they're just keeping on, for example, exchanges, because, okay, they somehow manage to get there and then it's just there. But with this one, actually, I think it's just pushing them in the direction that yes, self-custody is not like a difficult thing.
