As more individuals and institutions enter the crypto space, the need for secure storage of digital assets becomes paramount. In the next fireside chat, the CEO of Ledger will show us how the company is leading the charge to provide secure user-friendly solutions that help build trust in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, paving the way to mass adoption. So I would love to invite onto the stage the chairman and CEO of Ledger Pascal Gauthier and business journalist at CNBC Arabia Misa Eid. Big round of applause, please come on up.
Welcome everyone. It's a real privilege to be here at Blockchain Live Dubai 2024 to have an interesting discussion with the chairman and CEO of Ledger, Pascal Gauthier. I am Misa Eid, the business journalist at CNBC Arabia, and we have a lot to talk about in this panel. So we will talk about what's new and next in crypto security. We will focus on decentralized finance since it's the trend nowadays. And most importantly, we'll talk about how the crypto world is now larger than ever and it's influencing important events such as the US elections, for example, and that's why it's really important to make it secure. So with no further introduction, I'd like to go to Pascal directly and congratulate him for the 10-year remark on his journey in this industry in securing digital assets. And first Pascal, congratulations. It's a huge milestone. I want you to tell us about the proudest moments during this journey and what are some milestones that led Ledger into this remarkable date today.
Thank you. Thank you very much for the introduction. Hi everyone. This is a very proud moment. 10 years ago in crypto, when you were talking about Bitcoin, people would look at you with a little smile and very quickly ignored you because 2014 was a very different time. And so to be here on stage with you, CNBC, with the big screen and this big attendance is such a shift. So for me, it's such an honor to be here in front of you today and such a great pleasure. These kind of little moments like this, you know, I remember 14, 15, 16, my god, these were terrible years, very difficult, nothing was happening. And so to see a crowd like this here today, it's amazing. But more importantly, I always do a test: raise your hand if you own a ledger. Wow. Okay, that's that. So also for me that's a very proud moment because from when we started Ledger in 2014, we didn't really know if hardware would be a thing. Every year we were thinking, until 2017 in the bull run, we were thinking maybe we should stop that business and do something else in blockchain. And suddenly in 2017 it became a thing. And when I see a room like this and people raise their hand when I say do you have a ledger, it's really great. But one of the big moments for me personally, and as a CEO of Ledger, because I was trusted with the job five years ago, was the launch of the new products Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex. And for me, this is a big moment because I heard DeFi earlier, and the business is moving so fast now, and usage is moving so fast that you need to adapt hardware to the new usage. And so for me, now is a good moment because I'm not looking back at the 10 years, I do for memories, but I'm looking forward to the next 10 years, which I think are going to be even more exciting.
Yes. So you mentioned the ledger flex and ledger stacks. Can you tell us how these products first of all help users how to interact with their digital assets? How they change the game? And second, how they are making it secure for users.
Yeah. So first and foremost, security never changes. So even if we bring new products to the market, they're not more secure. They bring the same security, which is absolute security to your assets. This is the game that we're trying to play. So the new products are not more secure, but they're much easier to use. You know, we come from an industry that is very geeky and it's very normal. Developers are first, developers are the reason why this market exists. And so when you start developing product, it's developers that are first doing it and they develop products for other developers. And so the first ledger products were very hard to use. Easy to use probably for cryptographers and hardcore developers, but not so easy to use for the general public, the general audience. But as the market grows, you have more and more people that are newbies that are coming to the market and don't want to go through the hustle of trying to understand how a product works. They just want something that is easy to use. And sometimes security and ease of use are opposing each other. Right? If you want to make something very secure, sometimes it's very hard to access or very hard to use for security reasons. And so it's a bit of a challenge that we took on to try to design new products that were much easier to use and still as secure. And the reason why we did it is because we knew from our current customers and the people coming that they sometimes were not at ease to use self-custody or to trust themselves, mostly because of the onboarding process number one, and then the ease of use or the everyday ease of use. And I can say with pride that Stacks and Flex are actually fulfilling that dream of having a product that is now easy to use and almost for everyone. And I'm not saying it, users are saying it online. We have so many reviews now. So pretty happy with what's out there.
Yes. Uh so Pascal, everyone now is talking about AI. We are living in an AI world in a technological revolution. How are you integrating AI and technology into these products and how are you making it easier and seamless for user experience?
So I would say that our products are more like anti-AI than AI enabled. In the sense that if you think about AI, you think about it as digital abundance, you can think about it as robot artificial intelligence, something that is non-human, where cryptography actually and your ledger is what makes you profoundly human. Only human can sort of take a ledger and prove something. When you do a Bitcoin transaction with a ledger, what you're really doing is proving that you're the owner of a private key. That's really what you're doing. And so very similarly with your ledger, what you can do is prove a lot of things in a cryptographic manner. Because only you control the ledger and only you control the secrets in a ledger, you're going to be able to start proving a lot of things: proving that you're human, proving that you're 18, proving that you're from the UAE or the United States, etc. Many things. And actually that is the yin to the yang of what AI is. If AI is abundance, cryptography is scarcity, and you're going to need that in the world. How are you going to differentiate a non-human intelligence from human intelligence? Probably because you have a ledger in your hand and you're going to be able to prove that you're human. Yes.
Let's shift into a topic that I think many of the ones attending this panel wants to know. How does Ledger make it secure for users? And here I'm not only talk about the individual users but also in the institutional level in B2B partnerships. How do you make sure it's safe for users?
So I think if you want to narrow down Ledger to two critical inventions, one is a secure operating system that we can run in any secure hardware environment. It sounds crazy to say it like this, but Ledger has the only secure operating system for crypto and blockchain today in the world. And we are coding it directly on the CDCM of a secure element or coding it directly into a hardware security module, which is basically a very secure server. And the second thing that we do that is very unique is once we've done that, we are connecting your hardware security with the operating system to screen and buttons. And so what you really have with your ledger is a secure screen. It sounds crazy like this, but I presented this a few years ago to the chief strategist of Samsung, and for him, he looked at the product and his first sentence was like, 'Wow, you actually have a secure screen.' And it was interesting for me to see because we knew we had a secure screen, but it was very obvious for Samsung that they don't, what you don't have with your phone and your computer are secure screens, and because your screens are not secure on phone and computers, basically, attackers can put whatever they want on the screen, or whatever you see on the screen is not really what's going to happen in the background. And so, this ability to have your private keys secure by Ledger, but also to have a secure screen, is very unique in the way that you can do security in the space, and therefore we can enforce initiatives like clear signing, and this is why Ledger Stacks and Flex are so important to the future. You have bigger screens, bigger secure screens that are touch screens where you can clear sign every transaction. Right now, most of the market is blind signing, which is poor in terms of security. And we're trying to switch the market to clear signing everything, because this is where you get maximum security. If you don't see a transaction on a secure screen, then you cannot sign a transaction.
Yes, there's also the multi-signature technology. How is it helping in making the user, for example, helping in making a seamless experience for the users and also more secure?
