Ledger Wallet

Basics

• Based in: Paris
• Started in / Announced on:
• Hardware wallet
• “Ledger leverages encrypted chips technology to build security solutions for cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Hardware Wallets for consumers, Hardware Security Modules for enterprises and Hardware Oracles for the IoT world.”
• Supports: Bitcoin, Ethereum and ERC20 tokens, Dash, Zcash, Ripple, Litecoin, Stratis & Dogecoin and many more.
• Read here on the difference between cold storage and a ledger wallet

Audits

Bugs

• Was one of three (2-7-2020) wallets with a bug which allowed double spends on BTC and DOS attacks on people.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Has been an OG hardware wallet for a very long time.

Cons

• Ledger Live has trackers in 6081 different places inside 735 files (7-12-2023), truly impressive spyware.
• Got into scrutiny after it turned out that they could access (2023) your private key through software updated. Once touted the opposite: “Blockchain Open Ledger Operating System (BOLOS) is an embedded secure OS powering Secure Elements (SE), Hardware Security Modules (HSM), Secure Enclaves (Trusted Execution Environment -- TEE, Intel SGX). Contrary to legacy solutions such as Java Card or other industry OS, Ledger features an asynchronous architecture which enables a full orchestration of business code directly from the secure world. BOLOS is an unobtrusive framework allowing to run multiple applications all in isolations from each other, and build open source native code which will be portable from one secure platform to another.“

Team, funding, partnerships, etc.

• Has a team of 25 people, is headquartered in Paris and has one office in San Francisco.
• "Current president Pascal Gauthier will become the new CEO, replacing Eric Larchevêque who will transition to head of the Executive Chairman of the Board; the switch was made in light of recent efforts to bring in institutional money, particularly with the recent Ledger Vault announcement; Larchevêque will focus on regulation and government interaction for Ledger in his new position."
• Pascal Gauthier; CEO (former president)
• Larchevêque, Eric; head of the Executive Chairman of the Board (former CEO), he launched La Maison du Bitcoin - a French Bitcoin center, before co-founding Ledger.
• Bacca, Nicolas; CTO, “After 5 years at Oberthur and 10 years developing smartcard OS for his company Ubinity, Nicolas founded BTChip, an open standard secure element based hardware wallet that is now part of Ledger.”
• France, Thomas; CBO, head of the San Francisco offices of Ledger, where he is in charge of developing business operations.

Funding

• Got a $2.9M investment from Samsung in 4-2019.
• Is a sponsor of Coin Center
• From CoinDesk (10-6-2021):

"Ledger closed a massive Series C funding round led by digital asset fund 10T Holdings. The Paris-based company raised $380 million, according to a press release on Thursday. Ledger’s funding round also garnered support from Cathay Innovation, Draper Associates, DCG (the parent company of CoinDesk), Korelya Capital and Wicklow Capital, among others. Ledger’s previous raises came by way of a $7 million Series A funding round in 2017 and a further $75 million via a Series B in 2018."

Partners

• Is a partner with SWFT, according to their website (20-4-2020).
• Is a partner with DeversiFi, according to their website (4-6-2020)