AMA with Ledger | Charles Hamel

Transcript

hey bankless nation uh david and i are excited to present you with this ask me anything with ledger we have the vp of product charles hamill from ledger with us we're going to ask charles some questions that we have questions from the community about this amazing hardware wallet device that we think is imperative for your bankless journey it is called a ledger charles welcome to the show how are you doing thanks for having me well we're really excited you know like i think a lot of uh bankless community members are uh power users of their ledgers we we call it kind of like um standard issue equipment if you're working on buttons the ledger yeah we wear out the buttons from the bankless

journey you need one of these right this is how you self-custody your keys uh and the pairing with metamask is um is also really cool so we're hosting this ama to ask some questions uh that the community has for you and that we have ourselves from the community um just so bankless folks are aware actually we we published a fantastic guide not too long ago we call it the ultimate guide to the ledger um this is what a ledger looks like i'm sure many of you are familiar with it and this guide basically goes through how to set up a ledger how to backup and store your ledger how to add and swap uh assets with it how to stake eth with your ledger how to uh use d5 with your ledger basically it takes you from like

let's say an exchange like coinbase all the way to using a ledger in your everyday life for thankless things for all of the d5 things that uh that you know and love so um we'll include a link to that in the show notes there's also if you're a bankless premium member nice 20 off bonus of ledger devices which might come in handy during the holidays um well with that out of the way charles let's get to some questions man you know i think i want to start with this question uh and this is something that um is is is kind of like a a a question about usability and and the pairing from a number of different i guess related projects so a common setup for people who are going bankless is they'll have

their ledger device and then they'll pair that with metamask right so they get the protection of a ledger uh they're going bank list they're not storing keys inside metamask but they use metamask as the user interface on a browser chrome uh let's say or maybe um brave or maybe firefox but let's talk specifically about the chrome plus metamask plus ledger combo can you tell us about the relationship between these three things because i imagine it's pretty hard to coordinate all three projects together and uh is that why things get kind of clunky and messy sometimes maybe just start with the relationship between them and we'll talk about some of the

troubles that we've had in the past and what we can look at in the future certainly so you know if you zoom back um probably three years ago when we first started seeing the emergence of of dapps really and that's all since since uh kind of the the inception of uh of uh of the term almost had uh a web front end right which means that you know the primary way to access these these apps that kind of talk to uh you know a platform like ethereum was through a browser and browsers don't have the support for these you know web3 apis to be able to first of

all do the key management and also talk to the blockchain so metamask as well as others tried to fill that gap right so extending basically the the browser capability so that these that front ends could then you know ask it some some uh api to to sign things talk to some api to send this transaction to the blockchain so this was kind of to things like metamask were created to fill the gap and there were other approaches to this um like at opera where the the wallet was integrated in the browser and where brave is going now as well in the same direction where you know the wallet is coming closer and closer to the browser so there's a gap

that needs to be filled and metamask fills that gap for a lot of people and the extensions right on their own have a lot of restrictions right on how they operate because the browser wants to keep users secure so it's a very restrictive environment so there's that and then we on top of that add the the ledger device which is really kind of the key management function that metamask can do in a software mode but is really a lot more secure in in hardware mode as we as we all know and for metamask to talk to our device right it needs to you know communicate over usb or over bluetooth

and there's very useful ways to do it but they all kind of have to go through the browser and the browser has their as its own agenda the extension is in this very restrictive mode and you know the ledger wallet is basically trying to listen to these signals but obviously if any of these bits um you know where supports get deprecated for some protocols then you know things get get pretty pretty iffy as we've seen in the last few months um so yeah these are all kind of different projects uh fulfilling different functions like from a tl dr you could say the browser is kind of what you displayed adapt with metamask is basically the plumbing so that the the front end can talk to the the key

manager and the blockchain and then you have the ledger which is really fulfilling this this key management function and all of these have to work in unison for you to interact with adapt so the metamask is our portal into the defy universe that's how like me and ryan talk about metamask it's the thing that connects our wallet with the world of web3 and what you're saying is because we inherently have this browser-based internet this browser-based universe that portal needs to exist inside of the browser right it's not like metamask is this application that's installed on your desktop it's something that exists inside of the browser so we have to succumb to the browsers universe therefore we are at the whim of the

browser uh and is is that kind of what happened with chrome like i'm kind of getting like flashbacks of that that story that like you know facebook changes its apis and then all of a sudden all the applications that build on those apis also just get like gate and also have to change is that kind of a similar story with metamask and ledger yeah so so two things there i think there's different approaches to this so i think there's the approach of you know building a wallet inside a browser and there's a approach of building a browser inside a wallet and sometimes these browsers can be quite you know special purpose like if you think of um like things like uh like a trust wallet for example or ledger live or there's very special purpose browsers basically built

inside a wallet um so there's different approaches but specifically for for chromium and what happened with metamask is indeed like this this extension basically depends on whatever the browser provides and the support for one of the protocols that we use uh by metamask to to talk to ledger devices was deprecated um which means that you know metamask can no longer talk directly to the device uh and that's why you know you you under uh the past few months had to go to this basically a workaround where our app led your live was invoked to provide this connectivity right so that's why it added a few extra steps in the ux

um and uh you know people found it problematic and it was really a workaround right and we've been working since then with the metamask team to to improve this because we we've you know we've been listening and we've been hearing the pain on all sides um and this has been a on top of our common agenda um to to resolve so is that more or less the pitch of ledger live it's a wallet with a browser inside of it rather than the inverse which is chrome it's a purpose-built browser to specifically do crypto defy stuff and it gives a little bit more sovereignty to the wallet in ways that chrome never will

i i wouldn't say that's that's the pitch uh we you know we want ledger life to be the point of entry for people who come into crypto so that they can you know first of all learn about crypto learn about why subconscious is important maybe you know an angle yeah yeah it's an angle like we we have you know now we give access to to the apps within ledger live so that you know you don't need to connect your wallet and we can go into that later but yeah that's certainly an important aspect to to ledger like going forward having access to these dapps like right inside of it so as go ahead i was just gonna ask when you have these three parties here right so you've got the the browser you've got the the meta mask wallet and then you've got the the hardware wallet for you know

uh key management basically um how do we how do we fix the integration problems between these right so like i think a lot of people this last spring and summer they woke up one morning and then suddenly what the hell my ledger wallet doesn't work with metamask and chrome anymore and like they don't know why right they don't know all of the intricacies of of why and you know everything that you just described but um i'm i'm i'm wondering given that there are three separate sort of projects and parties with their own competing agendas is it uh is it gonna get any better or how how can ledger and metamask and i don't even know if chrome even cares at this point

like do browsers even is is is web3 even on their radar to care enough to patch this up so like give us some hope for the future and i know you've got some partnerships going on with metamask like what's that about um you know tell us how uh maybe ledger sees this getting fixed certainly so first of all like on the chromium kind of deprecating the support i wouldn't you know i wouldn't look at it as in any nefarious way of web 2 against web3 i think this you know the deprecation of this kind of usb uh getting a bit technical here but uh i think your audience is well into that so um kind of the usb um

api used to talk to the device is something that's used for other things like ub keys and and basically any accessories that can be used in a web context so it's not web3 specific at all um so there's that and then on you know how we can make you know the ledger and metamask collaboration better then this is exactly what what we've been up to in the past few months is you know we sat down with the metamask team and said you know we we want to solve this like our users uh hate the current situation your users are shouting as well um and really let's make it better and metamask is an open source project you know all of our apis are also open source and we decided to

to really make a common effort um and this is really the starting point of our metamask collaboration we want to extend on it and maybe you want to go into that as well so to make um the ledger experience uh you know best in class so that you can bring your own keys to web3 in a most secure way that's awesome so can you contrast with um kind of everyone sort of who's used this knows the current state right how you connect your ledger to metamask and sometimes in chrome you kind of cross your fingers and hope that it works and then sometimes you have to like switch browsers in order to to kind of get this combo working this is kind of

the current state um and it doesn't feel super seamless but with a metamask plus ledger partnership of the type you describe charles what do you think the possibilities are in the future like six months from now 12 months from now what's the user experience going to be like with metamask and ledger so there's two big things on our common map mind and roadmap is first of all have a kind of ledger on onboarding mode so that you know you can install metamask and right there before you create a seed that's specific and to metamask you can just connect your wallet

um which means that you don't have to create new accounts that kind of with a different seed as your as your ledger you just bring your keys to metamask right and metamask just sends transaction to your ledger so that that's been a big ask for our users and also from a security point of view like people have a hard time just you know so like preserving the seed in a secure way now you have two seeds one of them is more more sensitive than the other it's like it's really messy situation so we want to solve that uh so a ledger onboarding with metamask and then the second big item for us is is mobile so metamask as you know is is now on

as an app available as an app and the same problem arises there right you you really want that that web 3 hardware security on mobile as well um and we have a great product for that with the the nano x that's bluetooth so now you can have a really portable um kind of usage uh of this wallet so we're we're we'll be working with the metamask team to add this connect your ledger from the app over bluetooth in the coming months and this seems like a good pair too because correct me if i'm wrong but like i don't think metamask wants um you know high value crypto assets stored

in its browser-based software private key storage method so if you talk to most like software wallet uh makers um [Music] key management is not it's not where you add value right it's just a liability right because then you it's very sensitive piece of code you have to get it right um and it's really uh it's not where you you add value for your users so so for them to add a ledger connect button it's just like okay people want the best security they just hook it there and we have less to think about and you know user gets the best security um so yeah it's it's really a win-win

right i want to talk about the the role of ledger live with uh the inside of the ledger ecosystem and also looking forward into the future uh and defy and really all of crypto moves and moves forward at a blazing fast pace so what what's the plan give us the uh the just to frame the context for listeners who haven't used ledger live why would they be interested in ledger live and then also what's the plan for allowing ledger live to match the pace of d5 progress right when there's so many new things coming online how is ledger live supposed to be able to keep up with all those things yeah so um basically ledger live started as really

the companion app to your hardware right it's the app you you install to set up your hardware you know go through the onboarding and and see your assets now ledger live is evolving towards being really a platform where you can discover defy and nft services within it you can sort of connect your wallet obviously see all of your assets and interact with these new applications very securely with clear signing on device so it's going from a companion to to a platform and we already support over 20 layer one blockchains which you know i would challenge you to name them all but it's you know

ledger's been it's been around for for uh for many years now and of course a lot of of chains has uh has grown and shrink but we we have um we're really targeting to have the the top market coin top market cap uh protocols supported inside live so why ledger live then because you can see all your assets right there's very few wallets out there where you can see all your assets across multiple ecosystems like there's a lot of good ethereum options even with like different networks on eve i'm sure you all you know them all but it's very rare to see this cross

ecosystem like very functional wallet where you can you know send receive stake and and now interact with dapps across multiple ecosystems and then and then when it comes for like new ecosystems coming online or new defy apps coming online is it how does that work for developers who just want their thing integrated with ledger so there's two two layers right there's the protocol layer which you hinted at that is moving at a rapid pace and the application level is also moving at a crazy pace right where we're in a crazy industry but on the protocol side like ledger live first of all is an open source wallet right so you and and we're ramping up tremendously on

the developer relations side and developer documentation and really building the right kind of abstraction so that people can come in and build support for for their new layer 2 or their new blockchain and we've you know just last week we announced that at our ledger open conference that two there's two new layer ones that were added to to ledger live and we have solana coming made by the solana foundation uh in in early next year so we know we cannot build it all ourselves and you know we don't want to be this ivory tower either that you know decides what makes it or doesn't um

so it's really an open platform and this is we think this is how we we can keep the pace basically because people will want ledger connectivity for their chain and their liver to network so if it's an open source platform how do how are poll requests or like i'm not too familiar with like github lingo but like when somebody builds something on ledger how does it actually come to show up in the actual ledger live app that people have downloaded on their computer sure so yeah we use github uh like all other projects and you know for we we have a developer discord uh so you can like directly talk to ledger engineers uh through discord and you know discuss

like certain pull requests and how we can get them in uh of course there's code reviews and and you know qa and all that it's not automatic merge but uh uh you know there is a process in place and you know i invite everyone who's interested to check our new developer portal um developers.ledger.com so this is pretty cool because i remember in 2017 uh 2018 that era people when people were still just trying to get their heads wrapped around an application layer people were like okay we have like app stores in you know ios world in google world uh and now we have decentralized applications so like now we need the dap store and like so many so many different projects we're like focused on like building the dap store um this kind of feels like a

dapp store but it also feels like a dapp store uh so it kind of also is like in the same way that like these layer two chains this is gonna be a little bit of a stretch of a metaphor so bear with me uh it's like you know optimism arbitram uh polygon you can permissionlessly deploy your application on these trains and then they're on on one entire ecosystem and then with uh the ledger live being an open source like github you can develop on on using that that software and then you know submit submit your code and then go into the discord and say hey like let's get this thing going it's like a little bit you know it's reducing the barriers for actually building on ledger live and so it's kind of like this community uh not not totally community operated but just like

you know the the barriers the walls are are lower on ledger a lot in the ledger live dap store and allows for more and more developers to just seamlessly build their stuff on it is that all the right perspectives this is really uh this is really an intentional effort you know from our side to to open this up um and you're right right we [Music] basically all dapps need a front end right and you know if we move to a pure app store model with a native app distribution to me that um you know that goes a bit a bit against the ethos of this whole space right this is about like permission as permissionless building right and permissionless composability and the web to me is is the platform for the front-end to to

this new this new web tree right um because it's the only platform that that allows you to push stuff into the ether and uh be accessed by you know a global audience without asking permission and and that browser component can live in various different applications like a facebook app as a browser know wechat has a browser and you know basically all apps have some kind of browser functionality nowadays um and uh yeah we think it's it's the way forward to to distribute the apps so uh guys by the way if you you're any everyone is tuning in here if you have questions feel free to ask them in youtube uh as well we've got that fired

up so just put your questions in the youtube chat we will get to those questions david and i have a few more of our own kind of questions from the community as well that we've sort of curated and then we'll get to all of your questions but um charles one of my questions is i remember the early days of ledger where uh cryptocurrency was a bit more simple okay and um it was basically like you saw uh you know transactions were simple like i'm sending some some tokens or some eth from from one address to another and i could very easily see that on my ledger display it was like do you want to send this yes no how much here's what gas costs cool and then you could do with tokens too do you want to send this die yes no here's but so with defy our transactions became

much more complicated right and so you started interacting with smart contracts with all of this like byte code that a human being can't possibly decipher and then suddenly i think users are in a position where they're signing off on transactions and they're like um i think this is right i get i trust the website i think i think i'm on the right dap i'm looking at everything but like i can't parse apart what this transaction actually means um i'm curious your thoughts on that is is there any way out of that from a product design perspective like some of the transactions that people sign off on they don't even know necessarily what they're actually

signing especially when they're interacting with complicated smart contracts with a lot of code there's no real way to display a message telling them exactly what they're doing in this transaction or maybe there is do you have any thoughts on that kind of conundrum of knowing what a user is actually signing sure yeah i also miss the good old days and so this is a huge problem and it's it's a huge problem but that's not you know that people that are deep into this like you guys are are aware of um and there's this problem that that we call internally uh blind signing but some other call it which i also like

yolo signing you know you're like you know am i gonna am i gonna sign this blob oh yeah all right one more time it seems like i should yeah yeah so um so yolo signing or blind signing it's a big problem because you know as our interactions with with web3 become more and more complex as you pointed out the how to express this this thing you're assigning to a human becomes more and more complicated and i think there's uh this is a key problem that that we're solving with with ledger live and that we want to solve also uh ideally outside of ledger live is

when possible is that we every dap that's integrated has clear signing so all the dabs that you see integrate in ledger live we have the developer of the dapp has made some contract decoding ledger applications let's call it that that is installed on the fly when you try to sign a transaction for this app and what this application does is do this kind of human readable display on your ledger trusted display to say that okay you're lending one if to ave and then all the all the strings are shown on the devices is um

no it's not just let your life telling the device it's the ledger live cryptographically verifying that this is the ave contract and this is the the method i'm calling in that contract and this is what the nice human readable string i should show so this is uh this is really you know a key a key pillar of you know what of the ledger life platform and the legendary platform is about discovery connectivity and security and this security comes from this clear signing all right so this is a requirement that we put on the dapps which you know makes everything slower because then it's it's a new um you know that developers are not used

to to making these applications and we're you know working hard to make it easier but we're solving this and just last week we announced that ledger open again that we're doing clear signing for all nft transactions now so nfts are you know smart contracts as you know they have some standard methods most of them and now all of these methods are decoded on device for all nfts so you see for example you're about to send one board ape or one pool suite membership on your display that's cool um so gradually we want to make

you know blind signing is gonna a thing of the past so that we're again in a place where you interact with your device and you know what you're signing so does this strategy of solving this blind signing this means that you are solving it at the software level not the hardware level right it's not solving at the hardware level so you yeah so uh that's the really the key and why why it's so hard as well is that um the the application that i mentioned this kind of contract decoding applications very small thing um runs on the device within the secure element oh okay so it's the chip inside of the ledger

that's doing the computation so so your your ledger live or your metamask just throws this unsigned transaction to your ledgers they sign this and then the ledger device itself figures out all right this is the ave contract this is the method this is our argument this is what i need to show to the user and is that all because the the ledger i mean it's definitely got like a small little chip in it but like is that something does it does it need to just have like a library of known identified contracts in order to interpret this kind of data so this is the application so basically this like it's a few kilobytes right um of information that allows it to figure out okay this is ave this is power swap this is unison yeah okay so

it's extensible right so you as you interact with the dap let your life figures out all right you need the ave decoding and then it pushes it to the device so the the suite of applications that are inside of ledger live is that that's it feels like uh with these extra add-ons these extra features where you're making uh the developers go a little bit of the extra mile to make it more human readable it kind of feels like just a little bit of guardrails around d5 because men by by the nature of just like you know making sure that everything can eventually become human readable so like is it a correct way to pitch to position ledger live as like d5 with guardrails where like you can do everything that you want to do in d5 but like it's got

some extra you know extra layers of protection so yeah we want to position it as the safe place right sure you may not have everything like all the latest things you want to ape into uh there but but um and there's always you know that's the beauty also with with ledgers you can bring your keys everywhere right so if you don't keep using metamask you feel free to do that and use the cutting edge stuff uh but yeah it definitely led your life we want it to be the safe place to interact with with web3 so that you know you don't need to connect your wallet and you know what you sign one of the uh the core thesis we've we started with on on bank list when we started charles is like um

basically individuals will need to custody their own private keys and get them out of banks in order to do these cool things and in defy and to the extent that we are able to go bankless as individuals is the extent that we take back our money system it becomes ours again and the the reason it's so important why we're big supporters of of ledger and products like ledger is because it it it starts to give individuals a way to self-custody their keys like there's kind of two worlds two two ways the crypto world can evolve right it can evolve inside of a bunch of what we call crypto banks we love them you know the coinbases the gemini's the krakens of

the world they're great and they'll provide all of the money verbs the the lending and the borrowing the staking and the paying and all of those things or it can evolve the bankless way where individuals actually have sovereignty over their private keys they're not giving their private keys to a third party and so user experience of devices like the ledger are so key to that and i know ledger has done some work this year in terms of um providing some of those money verbs like directly on the ledger device with with ledger live as you mentioned i want to talk about one that's kind of near and dear to our hearts which is uh staking so there's kind of a few ways you can stake of course but if you if you want

to kind of be binary about it you can stake inside of a centralized exchange and give up your private keys or you can retain your private keys and stake that way as well what have you guys done with staking as part of ledger because i think there are some ways you can stake using just directly from your ledger device using like ledger live talk about that a little bit if you will charles sure yeah i mean uh totally with you on that it could go both ways right you and the ledger and anyone that's sort of in the self-custody space has a big big role to play to make sure that you know the future that we dream of you know actually becomes reality right so

uh fully aligned with that um now for things like staking we also want to make it possible inside life to to do that in in a self-custodial way so that you you keep control over your keys and today we support um sort of direct protocol staking with with cosmos polkadot tron tesos and algorand and recently uh well over the summer we added uh staking for e2 via lido so basically you have the lido dap with clear signing in ledger live so you see like i'm staking one eve yes okay and then you give your ste spec uh and then you can use power swap to swap it back to if you'd like

um so so and and we're kind of expanding on our protocol support as i mentioned solana we obviously want one staking there as well um we've seen tremendous uh activity when we launched lido like the whole like not not having to need 32 eth was a big deal for a lot of users and you know that unlocked an enormous amount of heat for lydo um [Music] so we have to see if you know if uh if people prefer kind of this in-between solution of lido uh kind of liquid staking versus direct protocol staking i think they both have you know

advantages for different groups of people but you know we want to to enable users to to do that in a self-custodial way of course so i want to get into some of these community questions and a few of them have to do with the ledger debit card uh but i wanted to zoom all the way back out and just read the ledger debit card let's talk about that can you just kind of give us the the tldr on on this brand new product refresh right yeah so this is uh we announced it last week um at ledger open so the ledger card is um is coming early next year and there's a wait list which you can you know sign up for within ledger live but basically debit card in its initial phase will do two things

right first it allows you to off-ramp from your your ledger device so you can basically think of it as you have your card app which in ledger live where you can basically fund your card from your ledger with clear signing right so we remove some of the friction there and you can off ramp if you want to but really the the thing that attracted a lot of attention is kind of this instant crypto collateral fiat loan again it's a mouthful but yeah i think you get the picture which means that you can fund your card with your bitcoin your eth and then through this uh your card interface in ledger live say okay i want to

you know put like one eth as a collateral um and you will basically you know create this like micro loan for yourself with your own collateral and spend that that that fiat with zero percent interest rate you know for a month i think so um this is really um this is really new and um i think a lot of people were pretty excited about this this that's super cool so can that can that collateral be liquidated as well if it gets kind of if price goes down uh yeah i don't know exactly all the details of of that mechanism there and what are the thresholds but um there's certainly a fine print to read

as you can imagine but um in principle this is how it works uh and of course we we want to make it safe for users to to interact with this product controls the debit card itself right so is that going to be where is that going to be available is it going to be available across many international jurisdictions and when is it coming so early next year um and the exact list of countries i don't have offhand but we want to cover obviously u.s and eu were possible all right our u.s listeners are going like please be us please gary gary don't stop this

yeah think of how far we've come though so like okay so this is this is part of do you remember the early crypto dreams of like buying my coffee with my bitcoin right yeah this is kind of that right is this what we're talking about like so in the best ways if i'm if i'm correctly understanding this i have a debit card says some kind of a visa card or something i can use that wherever debit cards wherever visa is accepted i don't know if it's visa or mastercard or whatever wherever a credit card's accepted and then i actually have my funds private keys on a ledger device and i can kind of fill my debit card as i want and i'm

essentially keep storing my own private keys and i'm i can use my bitcoin use my crypto to buy my coffee anywhere anywhere i purchase that's essentially what you're providing here is that right charles yeah so there's a little nuance there that when you when you find your card you're sending your crypto but you're sending your crypto to um to a a not a custodian but basically the operator of this card service is a company called banks and banks uses ledger enterprise in the back end to to secure basically the key so ledger maybe you don't know but there's there's two parts there's the consumer business and

there's the enterprise business uh where we also you know have a lot of customers and manage a large amount of assets and so the same technology basically is being used end-to-end and then the uh the question from the user that originated the debit card conversation is how do transaction fees play into ledger's debit card i think it's a question of like how does the business model work for ledger um well i i'm not ready to to go into details on that uh as you know the the card is really uh something that's done by a different

team but uh all the information will be published in due time um when when the details are all set um very cool and then like you you said we can send like ether or bitcoin to like fund this this debit card but what about just like sending usdc and having like a declining balance is that a possibility that's also possible yeah very cool very cool i have another question um this one let's see comes from um uh freya i believe p-h-r-e-a uh what are our ledger's plans to make the ux not not feel overwhelming even for experienced users this person says i have three ledgers but still sometimes

use vanilla metamask over ledger on multiple wallets because the ux is a pain and here's kind of a side question that the same user asks uh same community member asks what are ledger's plans to make hardware wallets so easy that grandma could use them confidently i think that's a big question it's a question of mainstream right it's like how do we improve the user experience what are the next steps and i some sometimes i go back in history with this because i'm i'm always like oh my god it's so much better than it used to be everyone like you don't even know how terrible it was just a few years ago but it's also true we have so much further to go so will we ever get to a point where

grandma can use this ledger and what uh what improvements can we make on a user experience side of things so um first of all on the kind of frustrating ux with multiple devices we were aware of this problem and you know we're actively working on making it better so that you know you can use leisure live and you can figure out better if you know which account belongs to which device and this this kind of advanced use case is uh is improved so we're working on that and then for this to become really mainstream we we still have a lot to do on the software side but also on the hardware side like just thinking um the display size right the the small

fonts and how it's uh perhaps you know hard for people with vision problems to see what's on the the trusted display right that's that's quite basic problem but also needs to be addressed so we're working of course on on the next generation hardware and you know nothing i can you know go into today but um trust me there is a lot of effort being put into um you know defining the the next generation web 3 hardware so are there any other just form factors of hardware while it's coming down the line uh leisure is famous for having just like you know the the small usb stick type of hardware wallets are there are any future products of different form factors coming you'll see

okay fantastic uh yeah i cannot discover but yeah you know we're working hard on this okay cool what is the uh ledger nano s plus i've heard about this a little bit so [Music] sure the so the nano s which is really the the original um product uh it was launched i believe five years ago now and you know when you think about it just you know a piece of of electronics that you know still five days five years old still gets updates still supports the latest uh protocols uh it's quite incredible um but you know as usage of nfts and defies

is increasing the kind of the storage memory that's on the lns becomes really a constraint right because then you cannot have this clear signing for this and that and it becomes really impossible to to enable all these use cases with the nano s so that's why we're launching the s plus we announced the s-plus last week and the s-plus is you know or or best uh usb hardware wallet right so if you basically it's simple if you want kind of a

a hardware wallet where you want to do you want to store assets across all chains interact with d5 and do nfts but you don't need the mobile aspect with bluetooth s plus it's a perfect option and then the x is really for the mobile option if you want to use the app on ios and android and you want to sign trans or you know the upcoming metamask integration uh that would be the best option but both of these devices will support and all the chains and all the clear signing so i believe at the start of this year there was a data breach hack on with with ledger with customers information their

addresses and email addresses which is uh concerning just by the very nature of what ledger's product actually is which is this thing that holds bare assets what steps has ledger taken to just ensure that customer privacy is just retained in in a secure fashion certainly so um obviously we we took this this incident very seriously and if you look at you know the basically our poor smart term on the event this was really was really uh kind of a breach at the third party that made this all possible but on top of this like we

we now have a dedicated security team whose all-purpose is basically how to figure out how which data can we no longer have and which and which data can we remove to basically um go from a typical web to uh scenario of just you know uh which we've never done but it's like a typical web 2 mindset would be you know gather all the data you you that's possible to gather about the customer but our approach is really you know what is the minimum to fulfill our legal applications with warranties and taxes and that sort of thing and get rid of this data as soon as possible so we we have um

our chief security officer that you know goes through all the company processes and make sure that this is really um at the top top priority for all the teams building um [Music] that you know we we don't want this data basically so that this cannot happen again here's another question from uh member of the community do you have any plans to implement uh shamir backup that's the the idea of multiple c phrases i believe i'm not quite familiar with that yeah to to split the seed phrases so um we're certainly looking at ways to to make it um to enable this kind of use

case i won't comment specifically on on shamir um but this is something we're looking at yeah what would be the advantage of that i'm just curious like why would someone want that um i think if someone wants to not have to [Music] store the seed in a single place uh then you could i mean it's not a silver bullet because it adds the kind of the social aspect of having to have this seed split through a number of parties uh on different locations um there's some some challenges there but uh i think it's about removing a

single point of failure so what most people are looking for another user question is when support for bls signatures [Music] in my brain now um this is the if2 yeah yeah something to do with that yeah yeah yeah so uh i don't want to say anything stupid i'm not uh like an expert in into uh staking but ledger was the first to support

eve to stake him all right so i think the people that were um you know staking in the uh not the beacon chain but the you know the original like the initial deposits and the deposit contract for e2 a lot of them were made with ledger devices because we were first ones to to support these new signatures type and again um if you look at uh bitcoin taproot we were the first ones to support that as well um so um i think we it's um it's a bit underappreciated that you know

this um it's really a hardware platform that's extensible right where that we can extend ourselves when we want to but also that other people can build on it can add new protocol feature support um very rapidly here's a question for a user when you guys going to put your name on a stadium that was actually my question ftx style crypto.com style well do you know and this is kind of i'm not the one writing the checks yeah yeah [Music] i think this is working on its stadium too but you know that'll take some time the bankless stadium yeah previously known as the wells fargo stadium yeah the one in philadelphia um

well i think this is also a broader question maybe and i'm wondering what your perspective is here charles it's like what does ledger want to become and mirror us into sort of the the old world types of companies uh that um that we think about so we recently asked this question of like brian armstrong when he was on the the podcast of coinbase because it feels like there's kind of two paths for coinbase one is you become a bit more like a traditional bank right the other is maybe become like a tech company so it's either like jp morgan or like facebook right those are some paths and he's like hey there's this this middle path called crypto native which is maybe you know some somewhat different but but when i see ledger i kind of wonder about are you guys getting uh

going more the direction of like a bank right this debit card service is is somewhat interesting and then i see the direction of a platform like ledger live and well that looks a little bit more like um looks a little bit more like maybe a facebook type platform or like maybe that's another bank type apparatus and then also you have you have hardware right so you look at what you're live and you're like oh this is kind of like an app store so maybe you're more in the model of uh an apple or a samsung or something like this um where does ledger see itself how do you see yourselves evolving into the future are you going to take one of these paths or do you think there's a distinct path for ledger so um we don't want to become a bank

exclusive on bankless right the right right podcast but um so that that's out of the question but all this is exactly why also we we chose to partner with uh with with banks which is a our partner to actually operate the whole banking part how do you spell that by the way b-a-n-x-x uh good that you asked i asked um so uh so there's that we're really taking a partner approach there so they have their own licenses and you know we we want to remove the friction basically between going from the old world to the

new world and you know we're doing it with the debit card we're doing it now with ftx i don't know if you saw the announcement but you know this whole friction of copy-pasting addresses you know to withdraw and deposit like with uh thanks to our partnership with ftx this will now be gone right so you can like seamlessly go from self-custody to custodial and you know the full power of a trading engine um seamlessly so we're really about giving access removing friction um and becoming this this platform where you can start your ledger journey and start your crypto journey with ledger

today it's not really possible because you know our app is still made like it's it's meant to be a companion once you have the hardware already right there's there's a big education component that that will now be part of the app for anyone that doesn't have a ledger yet um so we think so education and culture like we you mentioned like the stadium like to me the bigger question is how do we make our products relevant in culture and we're quite lucky to to be physical and this is also like there's very few physical crypto products um and there is something spec i mean we're humans and

we all want to live in the metaverse and stuff but at the end of the day right you have this in your pocket or in a necklace and as we you know work on the next generation of hardware we also think about um about these aspects um so we definitely want to be a platform we definitely don't want to be a bank we definitely want to be part of culture and you know working especially on the nft side right if you think about it nfts are inherently about ownership they're you know you have creators and creators need creators want to keep agency they want to keep provenance of of their creations

and really we're spending a lot of time with creators to to um to tell them about self-custody and how how to create uh using ledger products charles last question for you and then i think we'll probably wrap wrap up after this alessandro on the youtube asks any plan for a ledger dow uh but also zooming out uh is what do you think is the most likely future uh ledger dao ledger ipo or ledger staying private which which is most likely uh that your dao well that's you know everything uh rolls off the tongue yeah

that's your coin i've heard but uh no ledger dao is the first time i hear it that uh it's um you know it's really uh it's really trendy right now turning everything into a dial right uh no so i think that's it's not likely we raised the series c over the summer uh so it's still a private company um based in france i mean some some of you don't know that um so i wouldn't say like ledger dao is really in the cars right now but what about going public that's certainly a possibility down the road well charles thank you so much for uh

for hanging with us on this ask me anything i think the community got a lot of good questions and we definitely appreciate what you guys are building and um you know been definitely ledger you many ledger users in the bankless community who appreciate it uh and so just to recap i guess some things to look forward to in 2022 we got the debit card which is coming that sounds cool we've got ledger nano s plus looking for an upgrade uh we've got this metamask partnership that we're looking to to see some additional uh fruits from i i suppose in terms of oddboarding user experience seems like ledger live updates are coming just on a continuous basis anything i missed anything else special we should look forward to in

2022. um no some more daps in live and more wallets that connect to ledgers right because we the the amount of inbounds people who have wallets that you know they just want to have a ledger button uh is really amazing so across all ecosystems so i expect you you'll see more ledger buttons uh everywhere ledger buttons everywhere that's what we're going to see ledger connect everywhere it's definitely become i think a cultural icon too so uh doing a great job with that charles thank you so much for joining us thank you thanks for having me it's been a great time uh bankless listeners of course make sure you check out the ultimate guide to ledger if you're looking uh in if you're trying to figure out how

to use the ledger how to get on board how to go go to from coinbase to ledger that's a great place to start also there's a link in there if you're premium member for 20 discount may i remind you letters make great stocking stuffers they're fantastic devices and we're in stock and they're in stock which is unusual these days right so there you go so uh you know stock up you know buy your relatives buy your friends people are trying to crypto pill on uh on give an excuse to use crypto give them a ledger first um that's often a way to get them in onboarded guys remember to like and subscribe as well when i finish with the message we always leave with you with you with none of this has been financial advice bitcoin is risky eat this risky team

ownership of private keys is risky look the bankless journey is risky you lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if okay crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the

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