With bitcoin soaring and AI threats escalating, the Paris-based hardware wallet maker is leveraging its lead in crypto security to redefine digital identity protection, setting its sights on a larger market.
By Nina Bambysheva, Forbes Staff
Crypto is back, bigger and bolder than ever. Bitcoin is on the cusp of $100,000, meme coins are mushrooming at breakneck speed, and a new wave of traders is flooding the market. But the surge in interest has also renewed an age-old problem: the constant threat of hacks. In the first half of 2024 alone, cybercriminals made off with $1.3 billion from crypto investors, compared to $657 million over the same period last year.
Enter Ledger, the Paris-based company launched in 2014 that has spent a decade perfecting the art of cryptocurrency protection. Ledger’s core product, a hardware wallet, is essentially a portable hard drive functioning as a high-tech vault for your digital assets. Instead of storing actual cryptocurrencies, it safeguards the private keys—complex passwords that grant access to your digital wealth. When you set up a Ledger device, it generates a 24-word recovery phrase akin to a master key—if you ever lose or damage your device, you can use these words to recover all your cryptocurrency on a new one. When you want to make a transaction, you connect the device to your computer and use the Ledger Live app to manage your crypto. The setup requires physical confirmation for any transaction by pressing buttons on the hardware itself, ensuring that even if a hacker compromises your computer, they cannot access your funds without having the physical device in hand and knowing your 24 word recovery phrase.
“When you’re a security company, the test of time is everything,” says Pascal Gauthier, Ledger’s 48-year-old CEO. And so far, Ledger has passed the test. In its decade-long existence, the company’s wallets have never been hacked.
Bitcoin’s rally from $68,000 to $98,000 over the past two weeks has supercharged Ledger’s business, with the company reporting a threefold surge in hardware sales and a 3.5x spike in transactions on Ledger Live.
But Gauthier is thinking bigger. “Cryptocurrency is at the heart of what we do, but we are becoming—we always were, but it’s going to be more obvious to the public—much more of a cybersecurity company,” he explains.
This ambition puts Ledger on a collision course with tech behemoths like Apple and Google, whose password management services like iCloud Keychain and Google Password Manager are widely used. But smartphones, for all their ubiquity, have fundamental security flaws, Gauthier argues. And popular software wallets like MetaMask or Phantom? “A terrible choice for security,” he says bluntly. “People with real money in the space understand this.”
The company has raised $600 million in funding, including a $380 million Series C in 2021 that valued the company at $1.5 billion, and a $108 million extension in early 2023 at the same valuation. It claims to have sold more than 7 million devices across 210 countries, securing around 20% of the world’s crypto—no less than $400 billion, based on Forbes’ estimates. And despite a year-long delay in launching Ledger Stax, its first device designed by iPod designer and founder of Nest Labs Tony Fadell with sleek Apple-like aesthetics, Ledger says it’s on track to hit $1 billion in cumulative 10-year revenue (the company says it’s profitable but won’t disclose specifics).
Hardware still anchors Ledger’s business, but services are driving much of its recent growth. Ledger Live, a mobile app for buying, swapping, and staking crypto and NFTs, and Ledger Enterprise, a platform for businesses self-custodying digital assets, now account for nearly half of the company’s expansion. The strategy is clear: diversify beyond hardware as competition heats up—not just from rivals like Prague-based hard wallet maker Trezor but from centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, which have millions of crypto-owning customers and continue to be the default choice for investors.
Pascal Gauthier, CEO of Ledger, and designer and board member Tony Fadell
courtesy Antoine Delage
“When the bear market hit in 2022-2023, the question was do you fire everybody, stop doing everything, protect cash and wait for the market to come back, or do you keep investing? We decided to keep investing,” Gauthier recalls. “My board asked me several times if I was sure, but I was because you want to be positioned at the beginning of the bull run with all sales open, meaning you have products to sell.”
And Ledger is moving beyond crypto, aiming to redefine digital security. Its newest feature, Ledger Sync, launched last month, tackles a familiar vulnerability: the reliance on centralized servers to store passwords and emails. Sync shifts control back to users, generating encryption keys directly on their Ledger devices—keys even the company cannot access.
In September, the firm launched another ambitious product, Security Key—an app that allows you to use your Ledger device with websites that support passkeys, which are generated by biometrics like fingerprints or facial recognition, or through multi-factor authentication (MFA). Security Key marks Ledger’s entry into the authentication market, projected to reach $40 billion by the end of the decade, and its response to a growing problem: the rise of AI-generated hacks and digital identity fraud.
“The cold storage crypto wallet market is limited, probably a few hundred million dollars,” says Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer. “The authentication market is multiples larger.”
Ledger’s premium wallet, Stax, features the first-ever secure E-Ink touchscreen powered by the Secure Element chip—the same technology used in bank cards and biometric passports to resist physical and remote attacks.
ledger
Ledger’s pitch is that its devices are more than just hardware—they’re a platform for building an ecosystem of secure services. Unlike software-first solutions, Ledger’s hardware generates encryption keys offline, mitigating risks of remote compromise. “Your Ledger could be something that gets you through borders in the future, and then the total addressable market becomes much bigger,” Gauthier says.
Ledger’s ascent hasn’t been without turbulence. Last year, its rollout of Ledger Recover, a feature designed for users anxious about losing their seed phrases, sparked a fierce backlash. The service, which allows account recovery through ID verification with partner Onfido, was seen by some critics as a betrayal of Ledger’s core promise: private keys never leave the device. The backlash pushed Gauthier to respond directly in a blog post, stressing that Recover was completely optional and promising to speed up plans to make Ledger’s software code open for public review.
Despite the misstep, Ledger remains the dominant player in the hardware wallet market with an estimated 30% market share. Its devices, priced from $79 for the entry-level Nano S Plus, a USB stick-shaped device with a small screen for basic crypto storage, to $399 for Stax, a premium credit card-sized wallet with a large touchscreen display that can showcase NFTs and connect wirelessly to phones, have found a wide user base.
Trezor, Ledger’s nearest rival, leans heavily on its open-source approach to appeal to transparency advocates, though it doesn’t disclose sales figures. Meanwhile, Block’s new Bitkey wallet, priced at $150, targets bitcoin maximalists by only supporting bitcoin ownership, and offers a more affordable alternative. The bigger challenge, however, isn’t just rival hardware—it’s convincing users to prioritize security over convenience. Just as most in traditional finance trust Fidelity, Schwab and Bank of America with their securities and cash, exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, as well as software wallets like MetaMask, remain the easy choice for many, despite crypto’s record of hacks.
Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation and a newly appointed Ledger board member, sees the market shifting in Ledger’s favor. “So many things have moved towards passkey and FIDO (“fast identity online” which replaces passwords with secure, device-based authentication using fingerprints, face recognition, or PINs), which means that people are already on the path towards a different balance between convenience and security,” she says.
Liu notes that while not every user needs a dedicated security device, high-net-worth individuals are already adopting tiered approaches to self-custody. “If I have a substantial amount of wealth, I would actually prefer to use an extra device that I set up and control entirely,” she explains. “Even among self-custodians, a tiered setup is becoming the norm. I’m pretty sure that all of the people who own Sagas (smartphones developed by Solana) today have Ledgers as well.”
Ledger’s ability to weather crypto’s cycles of euphoria and depression also convinced Fadell to join its board. “We’ve muscled through both external and internal issues,” he says. “I watched how Pascal and the board handled all of those things, and I was like, “Okay, this is the team I want to be more a part of. But I also wanted to make sure we were going to broaden the market out to a whole set of not just web 3.0 transactions, but web 2.0 transactions, authentication. Think about all the things we do today that now need to be secure because AI agents are running around impersonating people.”
Echoing Fadell, Gauthier insists Ledger is more than a wallet—it’s a tool for protecting fundamental freedoms. “If you don’t have digital private property that is secure and private, you cannot really be free,” he asserts. His ultimate goal? To make Ledger devices as essential to the digital age as passports are for global travel.
Blockchain Commons founder Christopher Allen, an identity expert known for coining the concept “self-sovereign identity” in 2016, believes the future of digital security will rely on multiple devices and systems. So move over iPhone, as people accumulate crypto wealth more electronic devices are on the way.
Says Allen, “I honestly think we’re very limited in what we can do with single-device hardware. The reality of both digital identity and of security is going to be heterogeneous, and multi-signature cryptography is finally reaching a level of maturity where we can achieve it.”
