Key Takeaways
-
Ledger started out making Bitcoin wallets, but now offers a full suite of crypto custody solutions.
-
According to CTO Charles Guillemet, the company always planned to grow beyond Bitcoin.
-
Today, Ledger powers custody for retail investors and large institutions alike.
When Ledger released its first-ever hardware wallet in 2015, the USB-style device only supported a single cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin.
As its customers’ needs have evolved, so has Ledger. However, the decisions the company made early on ensured it grew with the times, CTO Charles Guillemet explained in an interview with CCN.
When the Ledger Nano was first launched, it only supported Bitcoin because that’s pretty much all there was.
Nevertheless, “we knew quite early that the ecosystem wouldn’t only be about Bitcoin in the years to come,” Guillemet recalled.
With that in mind, the company didn’t just build a Bitcoin wallet, it built an open platform that could support any number of new cryptocurrencies, even ones that didn’t exist yet.
Instead of monolithic firmware that runs the Bitcoin signature algorithm and nothing else, Ledger designed a full operating system that would allow any third party developer to build their own wallet apps.
“As of today, we support, I think, around 200 different applications. And most of them have been created by third parties,” Guillemet said.
As the range of coins and tokens has proliferated over the past decade, crypto has evolved from a niche field into a relatively mainstream technology.
This change has seen major institutions like banks and multinational corporations enter the space, and Ledger has expanded its offering to cater to their unique needs.
“For individual retail users, self-custody is quite simple to define. You own your keys and you own your coin,” but for large organizations, defining self-custody is “much more difficult,” Guillemet observed.
For security and governance reasons, businesses can’t just entrust their crypto to one person, he stressed.
To address this challenge, Ledger developed a new custody solution that lets organizations program their own multi-party authorization processes.
As Guillemet explained, each party has their own hardware device running a custom version of Ledger’s operating system. Transactions require multiple approvals from designated team members according to rules set by the organization.
The post Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet on Growing Beyond Bitcoin appeared first on ccn.com.
