Hardware wallets and the future of signing: Ledger

Transcript

GM GM welcome to another episode of Webster Academy today on the show super excited to have Mo elside from ledger to talk all about wallets Hardware wallets web free education culture art so many things that we're going to be breaking down Mo welcome to the show thanks for having me excited to be diving into all of these interesting topics with you guys we've got to make a note to the fact that you're calling from in from Paris at The Ledger head office you had to fight for a meeting room because you've got so many people in the office these days I actually got kicked out of the meeting room so now I'm in a wonderful Booth with a very nice fun I hope you have time to hear it but but

yeah excited to be here let's start with the origin story of Ledger and maybe why you guys have decided to focus on Hardware wallets how that connects with your mission and your beliefs the foundation of what you're focused on building at Ledger that's a very interesting question how much time do you have the story of that Niche so Ledger is a French company most people mistake it for a you know American company was actually born in Paris 2014 wow old company at least from relative to the space and where we are today Ledger is kind of an orgy company so so it was started before ethereum and all that so it's just a Bitcoin yeah Bitcoin wallet previously interesting it's funny because I was just chatting with one of the co-founders of the company the other day for a separate project and I was

getting a little bit of insights from the beginning of The Ledger days and um so you know Ledger is born out of the idea that you need to actually secure private keys in an offline environment and we probably get a little bit more into why it's important in the first place but it's worn out of the actual idea of putting for private keys on a secure element chip and those secure ottoman chips are actually the chips that you can find in your biometric passports your credit cards there's this person that I mentioned is Nicole he actually is the person who invented that private keys on a secure element ship his company was called BTC chip back in the day and you know eventually he ended up meeting the other nedger

co-founders and a place here in Paris that doesn't exist anymore but he used to exist back in the day was called the misunder Bitcoin and Amazon Bitcoin was a physical space in which different Bitcoin fans would go up and meet that had absolutely no business model at all it was just you know born out of the love for Bitcoin and digital assets and they met there and they kind of realized the fact that people didn't necessarily have the ability to buy Bitcoin easily so they came up with this Bitcoin ATM machine idea where you couldn't Fiat by Fiat the actual machine would generate the private keys for you put it on a chip in a card so like kind of like a credit cards generate the private keys for you put your Bitcoin on the chip

obviously it didn't have access to your private keys were generated and forget it I'm not going to get into the technicalities by Magic you'd be able to buy Bitcoin get a card the card actually has your private keys on it and it has your Bitcoin and then at some point they kind of realize that they had to scale this and that there was a huge need for the ability not only to generate your keys and have Bitcoin on a card but actually to be able to create multiple accounts using those keys and to be able to expand the different use cases by actually owning those keys and interacting with the blockchain so that's how it started that was like in 2014 obviously the first Flagship I would say product was the Nano s in 2016 and from that we went to the Nano X and

Ledger live so Ledger live is the companion app that comes with your Ledger device it's an interface that enables you to manage your different digital assets send receive land stake and now it enables you also to access a wide variety of crypto services such as if I um apps and apps and nft marketplaces Etc so it became some sort of an ecosystem that started developing in 2019 2020 was Ledger Nanos plus and you know the edition of Ledger Market obviously within that time frame we started doing the what we call Ledger Vault so it's not only focused on individuals that are securing their digital assets but also Corporation to answer your question why is this really a core Mission it's mainly because we're moving from the internet of information

to the internet of value and the internet of information required certain type of Hardware but we truly believe that web 2 Hardware cannot protect web 3 value meaning that your internet connected device it's funny right it's the internet of information it's an Internet connected device that's designed to share information to Google with Facebook and you can log into Uber with Google and you can log into it's all like interconnected right and you're actually if you're using your internet connected device your web 2 Hardware I'll just refer to it as web 2 hardware for the purpose of securing your private Keys you're actually putting a secret on a device that's

actually designed to share information so it's there's a dicult and that results in a variety of different problems that we could see in the space so let your score mission is to provide individuals and corporations with the ability to own their assets and to own them in a way that's fully secure and that doesn't compromise on their ease of use and accessibility ownership and security but it's also ease of use and accessibility and that's what we've been trying to do as much as we can with the additional components that were added into the ecosystem Ledger live market Etc hope that wasn't too long of an answer very interesting so you're guys kind of sort of thoughts or your mission is that with these new iterations with the features that we're adding to the

internet with web 3 digital ownership being that main thing or self-custity I guess you're saying that like the architecture of the internet or the hardware of the internet that we had for all that just actually doesn't work it doesn't make sense and so we needed to build something else and that's sort of the reason why Ledger exists today yep I mean you'd have to redesign from the ground up if you want to have the smartphone to actually protect your private keys and then there are a few attempts at that but it's very very hard because you'd have to actually rethink the whole thing the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2

platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content Pro file and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-sovereignty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet

at Webster Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we've partnered with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today shared ownership is revolutionizing the way we think of digital ownership did you know that you can benefit from the utility of a board ape Yacht Club crypto Punk or azuki without actually spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy it how by buying an access key to the asset you see with segment you can now Buy and Hold parts of an expensive nft and share in its ownership and utility like airdrops or exclusive access as an owner of a high profile RT you can distribute ownership with access keys and create liquidity for yourself it's a win-win

situation plus the ownership and transfer of these keys are managed on chain which ensures transparency and security and we want the Webster Academy Community to be on the Forefront of this new wave of nft utility which is why we partner with segment a non-custodial nft platform set to launching Q3 of this year segment aims to allow users to easily create access keys and share ownership of nfts with other friends and community members the team is going through their Beta release soon and has opened up their waitlist for web3 Academy listeners if you want to stay in the Forefront web3 sign up for segments wait list today with the link in the show notes below shared ownership is a game changer and we want you to be there first was Ledger the first Hardware wallet I imagine 2014 there wasn't many others at

the time no I think that BTC chip was probably the first in terms of like putting private keys on a secure adamant trip I think that stuck would be the first attempt of that and then that gave birth to Ledger afterwards so and so outside of just becoming like a a wallet which I think is what most people think of ledge right now you can see that you guys are really building out so much more you called it a bit of an ecosystem I guess Ledger ecosystem I'm wondering if you can just paint a further picture of that like you kind of touched on it but maybe give us more details of just like what ledgers thinking there and like what that means to go and build out more of an ecosystem and how that relates to your to your overall mission I guess yeah 100 that's a great question you

know if you look at like the different things that a corporation or even an individual need to do in order to be able to safely navigate the space the variety of different steps there which one is to create your keys and store them securely obviously the hardware second one is to transact on the blockchain securely Ledger you know automatically if you want a ledger and you store your keys and generate and store your keys on The Ledger you're basically protected from malware and hacks because if you end up by mistake downloading a malware on your computer your keys are not on your computer any transaction that's actually initiated using your internet connected device will have to be verified and physically confirmed using your device it's your hack proof in some sense but when you're transacting on the blockchain you're

actually signing all the time so Ledger protects you from a hack it doesn't automatically protect you from a mistake if you end up signing action or if you end up giving getting fished and giving group seed phrase away your assets will still get taken away from you so the idea of building an ecosystem so starting with Late July obviously but then you know our new product Stacks also has a screen today that's much wider obviously it's going to be equipped with technology that enables you to verify where you're signing in a much more effective way and I'll get into that in a second and the second step is mainly transacting on the blockchain and understanding what's your sign so despite the fact that your keys are secured and you secure on your Ledger and protected by the secure elements Etc if you end up signing a

malicious interaction you'll end up losing your assets it's really unique to understand where you're signing and a big problem today that we have in the spaces Blind Side when you actually use your Ledger device or even just use a software only solution to interact with a smart contract the actual interface that you're using is not equipped with the plugins that would enable it to translate smart contract data hex data into human readable language so for us to be able to secure your web 3 Journey we also needed to adjust that second point which is that when you interact acting with a smart contract you need to understand what you're signing and we need to provide you with the information that would enable you to understand where you're signing and sign it you

know or not sign it based on that to be clear what you're speaking of I guess is the point at which you go to sign in transaction let's say you're using a ledger or metamask or whatever it is you're using there's a little message and it says like kind of what you're signing oftentimes that message is like xxxxx and I'm like what the heck is this what's going on here right or like it says something but it's so General you're like I don't really understand what I'm signing here I'm pretty sure it's legit but I don't really know that's what you're referring to is you guys can basically it's the wallet that controls the ux of that it's the wallet that controls what that's actually saying yeah so it depends on what kind of interface you're using so for instance to get back to Ledger live

Ledger plus Ledger live is actually completely designed for Clear signing only meaning that if we integrated the Apple Ledger live we work with the developers of you know the partners developers in order to put in place the plugin ends that would enable the translation of the smart contract data to be done automatically and then the information to be transmitted to your device's screen so for instance if I were to be signing a malicious transaction that would be taking a you know my board ape away from me if I was doing that on Ledger live I would see the fact that on board ape would be the traffic if you were doing that on another interface most of the time what's actually connecting you to the smart

contractors about your Ledger it's the middleware that you're using so the middleware could be used as a software wallet or Only Solution as well but if your keys are protected by your Ledger you connect your ledger to the software whether it be metamask or wallet connect or Phantom or Temple depending on which blockchain you're using and obviously what we're trying to do is that we're trying to work with all of these middlewares with the Technologies that's currently available to us in order to provide tier signing on there as well but starting with Ledger live Ledger live is clear signing only and then working with the different partners in the ecosystem we're trying to implement Solutions in order to provide clear signing using their middlewares as well for The Ledger users and then beyond that we're also developing our own

extension which is called Ledger extension and the added value to that is not only the clear signing bit because clear signing is based on what you're going to see on the screen of the device at the moment of signature Ledger extension will provide you with a web free check meaning that aside from the clear signature if you connect to a certain dot for the first time it will actually give you certain data points that will enable you to decide whether this is something safe or not if you're connecting or interacting with the smart contract for the first time it'll tell you that you're interacting with the first time we will tell you how much value is transacted using that smart contract it will tell you whether it was flagged by for malicious activity so before signature moment you're getting a scan of the different stuff that you're

interacting with on the blockchain that's kind of like the Second Step which is obviously transacting on the blockchain it's not only about the security of your Keys it's about the information that's given to you or that's available to you at the moment action and that would keep you away from falling into pitfalls or getting scammed in a more generous sense the third part is about for creators and corporations which is deploying your asset security corporations would go through the first Two Steps either ways you know they have to create their keys secure them transact on the blockchain in order to buy and sell digital assets at a certain point they will also as a Creator or Corporation you would also be interested in you know deploying a contract and distributing digital asset and this is

where Ledger Market comes in where you know the idea is to provide a Gateway 20.4 corporations that have never entered the space or are about to enter the space to be able to do it securely and then on top of that once you start generating Revenue you have to manage your Treasury and this is where vegetable resolutions come in the thing is that if you actually run a whole company's treasury on one single Ledger you have a big friction point there which is the governance who do you have the ledger to who secures your seed phrase water to your accountant doesn't answer his phone anymore there's you know things that you could go through so these are like the four different pillars that ledger is currently address

it sounds like the goal of Ledger is to become the ux of web3 if you want to interact with web3 do it with Ledger because Ledger has each type of wall all the way through each way to interact with everything you can do on in web3 and say you're trying to do it in the safest most secure way possible and essentially you're the front end ux of it all actually and the hardware before you answer that when you said deploy contracts for businesses and creators you mean like launching ft or minting erc20s or something yeah let's say your brand then the nft space is interesting to you you want to expand your product line and start launching you know nfts as Collectibles or membership tokens or whatever you actually don't have the internal resources for you to be able to

do that security on your own we don't provide strategic advice on how to best launch your nft project from a price point or template it's just the infrastructure that is needed for you to be able to do it securely that's what we provide it's all about security and it's all about securing as a individual or a community or Corporation your journey in the web free space and I'd like that you're approaching it from the different stakeholders that we have in the space so you mentioned the users being safe and the potential that they're facing you mentioned the platforms or the softwares that we all have to interact with and then you mentioned the creators and corporations whether that be one stakeholder or two different stakeholders sometimes you can separate

those in two because large corporations are different than small business creators but same idea so viewing it from those different stakeholders and I know you mentioned stacks and we definitely want to talk about Stacks because we're all super excited about that but before we talk about Stacks I just would love to just briefly talk about the user stakeholder a little bit more or because I mean that's where so many people are struggling right now and so I'm just curious let's say you're out at a dinner party and you're talking to somebody a friend of yours or somebody you've met recently what's your advice to them as a user to interact safely in the wallet or actually maybe let's back

up how do you explain a wallet to them how do you explain wallet ux to somebody new it really depends where their level of knowledge is what I usually try to do is to draw as many parallels as possible with the traditional Financial world because that's what everyone gets and to try and you know identify where transfi falls short and how web3 and D5 can help solve some of these frictions so if you look at it the way I see it is that the banking system is so limiting and a lot of people don't understand the fact that you don't really own your money I'm half Egyptian I grew up in Egypt during the Egyptian revolution and I can tell you that you know when you have a old back in system and financial system being completely shut down you kind of realize that you can withdraw more than x amount

where you can transfer more than than why I'm out and it's crazy because you know you kind of have that frustrating feeling this is my money I've earning this and I can't spend it so understanding this is key and once you understand this you understand that you are actually trusting the third party with your money and you don't really have a choice like I don't know how it's like in Canada but if you walk up to a bank and France here today and you ask them to withdraw 100 000 Euros I can guarantee you that you're not going to be able to walk away with the bank with a back full of cash even if this is your money yeah so understanding this is key and then once you understand that you're trusting the third party without necessarily having a choice you just have the choice in between like which

third party do you want to trust more than the others whether it be your fintech applications or traditional back you kind of understand that everything is based on your physical identity and that the only way for you to get access to those funds is to prove to the bank that you are you and for you as a person to be in the guard rails or in the framework that is designed for you as a citizen within those countries as soon as you get outside of these like borders and rules that are defined for you you'll be you know deprived away from getting access to your finances this is the situation of chat 5 but then when you start looking at like blockchain technology and what it solves the way I see it is that blockchain is a Bank that's open 1247 it doesn't care where

you're coming from who you are what you do in real life whether it's the weekend or Monday morning that's all the same the only thing it cares about is who owns the blockchain account that was created and when you create a blockchain account anyone with an internet connection can do so you basically have to just create a wallet first whether it be in a software or hardware and we can get into that but once you do create a blockchain account using wallet there are two set of keys that are generated the private key and the public key so your public key is kind of like your iban or email address you can use it to provide it to you know anyone who wants to be something else that's over to you whereas your private key is more like your identity your way to actually prove

that you are you you're if you take the example of a mailbox it's the key that actually opens that mailbox so understanding that your private key is the way for you to prove to that decentralized 24 7 open bank that you are the individual that owns this account is the first step into an understanding the whole notion of self-custody and the importance of securing those set of keys that's where you know you start talking and you can you know start getting into wallets and the different ways that are available to you in terms of like generating unsecuring those keys but the key is you're you know on-chain identity and it really opens up the Limitless possibilities that would be available to you in the world of a blockchain and web3 so that's how I usually get into it

you just said it opens up the world to so much more and I was gonna ask that because you talked a lot about the money side of it which is the way that many of us got into the space and obviously was the first use case of blockchain but the way I see it at least what we teach on our show a lot is that there's so much more to this whole world to web 3 than just money right I think there's identity there's your social reputation there's your content you mentioned a lot about creators now they're going to be making nfts and things that might not be Financial assets they might be more I mean everything kind of is a financial asset in the space as it boils down to it but like ultimately it's like something to access Community things that you like and you collect and

they're not worth anything than anyone but they're yours and ultimately those all go in your wallet too they go in the same thing that helps you access this 24-hour bank so I'm just curious how Ledger thinks through that is that something that's like on your mind and you're building for as well or are you guys focused mainly on defy and just like securing your money 100 I mean at the end of the day that's why I use the analogy of your identity is your key because your identity everything that you own at the end of the day it swore me to you it's really like you know whatever you own in terms of like Financial assets but also the cultural assets that you own but also your identity but all of your Unchained certifications but also your credentials and it's the combination of all of that

that creates your untrained identity understanding this very early on at least in the way we're developing our product we're trying to integrate as many functionalities into the system that we're enabled you to explore all of these different Avenues and also provide the platform for the future for future use cases we're really still at the nascent phase in terms of the different things that you can do would be wallet but if you think about like being able to own all of that independently from a third party is such an amazing invention and then being able to interact with different Technologies or with different interfaces at once using one single device to do all of that is also something that people don't realize how

much is going to impact Society in a more General sense right if you think about like your physical wallet today it has a lot of like these different components into it like you have your gym membership card and you have your credit card and you have your driver's license or what it doesn't have is it doesn't have your art collection it doesn't have your gaming assets it doesn't have your pictures and your social media accounts and event tickets and all of that so it's actually taking the base layer of what a physical wallet has and adding on top of it all of the elements that are actually only available to you in the digital world the biggest difference now is that the way what the internet was currently currently is and was developed

in the past doesn't actually enable you to own whatever you have digitally so now you're actually able to own it digitally on top of everything that you have in a physical world that's like such an interesting way to think about it because once you have that in mind then you can start imagining all of the future use cases that will be available to everyone that owns a wallet in the future so crypto wallet so that begs the question is wallet the right term for these things when I think of this as like yes there's a wallet and that was the main use case up until like 2020 but now it's like as you said this is also now my new account right like I have an account on Instagram everyone on Twitter blah blah blah now it's all in one right like my lens account and my I don't know

far Caster accounts are both on my one wallet now that's a big change from the web 2 world and so it's an account it's a profile it's where people can like find information about me it's like my LinkedIn right I guess that's a profile as well because I got my credentials in there I get so much more than a wallet so do we stick with that word or do you think that changes into something else I like to call it the Ledger makes sense like okay you're a marketer too I am a marketer book I actually when you think about it this Ledger is a book in which you can write everything that you own through digital Ledger you know if you think about what a ledger is in terms of like the different things that you can put in there you can actually combine

everything that we've spoken about I had never thought about that guys might be making that play it's like how Kleenex is actually a brand but we all call it Kleenex now right right no no one goes up to a bar and says hey can you serve me an energy drink right that's a good point this begs a question to me so when you guys watch stacks and for those who don't know what Stacks is like this was their newest wallet or Ledger whatever we're gonna call it felt have screen and when it first came out it actually kind of looked like Jay and I said well it looks kind of like an iPhone the question the debate that jaina had when we covered the story was are we going to walk around with an iPhone and a ledger Stacks or equivalent to it or does this replace the iPhone

because like why did my iPhone is my way that I go and interact with all of these accounts my Instagram account my Twitter account it is the hardware that gives me the ux to do that but if now my account's all in one piece of hardware and I don't need any of that anymore why do I need the phone so two questions here is that what you guys are thinking with this play and two who's your competitor obviously your competitor right now is metamasculine we're thinking of wallets is your competitor Apple that's what I think your competitor is but I'm just curious I don't think that our competitor is Apu I've been at the end of the day to come back to what we were saying is that ledger as a device today is meant to replace your physical one you have two things in your pocket when you're

walking around there's a your smartphone and your physical world as everything becomes more digitized your passport will end up becoming additional document your driving license will end up becoming a digital document your credit card is a already a digital document like I use Apple pay more than I use my physical credit card so so the idea is that we are trying to design the wallet for the digital world the web Tree World the internet of value and that would be designed specifically to work seamlessly with your smartphone because you're still going to need your smartphone a really great example on how that would work because obviously the partnership that we announced with Samsung a few weeks ago but you know to come back to

Apple the creator of the stacks is the co-creator of the iPod and the iPhone from me for that understanding exactly how you know Hardware can impact Behavior change impact the lives of millions of people around the world is really something that's deeply ingrained in the team that worked on stocks and their Vision into how to design something that's easier to use and that really solves a lot of like different frictions in the user experience and what Stacks is doing is really providing new engines and also you know native web3 Community with the ability to understand what they're signing in a much more seamless way but not only that

the onboarding experience is so much more seamless the ability to generate your C than the notes it down and getting back and verify it back into their devices I would say orders of magnitude more seamless than how it is today and then beyond that it's just a device that will enable whatever culture is being developed in the web 3D space whether it be art or different applications to actually come to life through a device that's designed to interact with them it's kind of also a first stepping stone into how your nfts will come to life on a larger device or running Hardware wallet and more generous sense right and Ledger live is also being redesigned for for specific

purposes and more apps will be available that will only be exclusive on Stacks we have you know nft drops that will be exclusive to Ledger Stacks holders so we call the Ordnance tax we collaborating with a variety of different generative artists so it's kind of taking the preconceived idea of Hardware device being something that's super technical it's called wallet at the cold storage you're not meant to be using it on a daily basis it's super complicated it's clunky Etc that's how I would say most new entrants perceive Hardware wallets today to something that they actually want to own that's easy to use that they want to be using on a daily basis that they want to be putting their favorite nfds on that they want to be interacting with their favorite d-apps with and on

top of that it's actually pretty cool when you have it in your hand it's like stackable you can stack many of them on top of one another you can name them so all of these are like many features that enable people to understand the value of owning a ledger device but also feel emotional connection to having a device that's actually nice to use okay get the idea that you guys are kind of Reinventing the wallet so let's get rid of the old analog wallets and let's have a digital wall that's touchscreen whatever like that makes it so obvious that that's the way that we would go I think anyone can understand that though I do I want to go back to this idea of like competing with apple and the reason I say that is like one I remember when reading a book that Steve Jobs was

talking about when they were making the iPhone was basically saying like we are competing with other things that are put in people's wallets we're competing with MP3 players we're competing with our own iPod and I don't even remember what the other devices we used to put in our pocket the time music that's what we're competing with people only have so much room in their pocket right so like okay we have room for a phone we have room for a Stacks that makes complete sense but like as we said everything is going to be happening in web 3 we're going to start socializing with web3 like let's say we use lens or we use whatever we're gonna start to do those things we interact with our banks through web3 we interact with a lot of you said credentials and tickets and all these things Webster okay so that's all going

to be on Stacks all you need to do is put a phone in there what's the point in having two pieces of Hardware like or it goes the other way and apple all of a sudden creates a hardware that allows you to store digital are you guys not doing or maybe you're not thinking about that because we need to make sure self-custody and securities first so we need to separate it from the thing that we're playing around with and just using like all the time is that the idea of keeping them separate or like do you guys picture them eventually merging I think they will emerge eventually but we're far away from it right right easier said than done you know Apple would have done it Samsung would have done it they tried or a variety of different you know examples in which this actually came to life but it's

really not as safe as how it should be and trying to put a secure element on a phone and basically all the wallet functionality is running on the phone basically requires you to rethink the design of the phone using the ground right right so it's very hard like imagine most of these phone manufacturers would have to either create a separate line of products that would only be focused on Hardware wallets that would be so much easier for them than trying to integrate a wallet into their phone the real overlap here today is what we've done with Samsung what we're going to be aiming to do with other phone manufacturers in the future is providing a seamless experience for the two of them to work together despite the fact that there's still two separate devices and then talk about a bit more

what that means like maybe you want to talk further about that partnership or just like how they're gonna interact more closely yeah so I think interacting more closely comes through a variety of like different Avenues right there's obviously the ability for Ledger live to be automatically downloaded into certain phones and for you to be able to buy bundle of a phone with a ledger and for the overall experience to actually have been designed tested for the two of them to work seamlessly without any bugs and for actually the different implementations that will be going on in the the future to start adding value to that user experience in terms of like security features additional features that you'd be able to get and then you know beyond that there's also the ability for these phone providers to work with ledgers ecosystem in general

in order to provide their own consumers with a lot more than just the hardware with the ability to you know tap into Ledger market for sharing jobs or get certain perks on when interacting with a you know Market or Quest or a variety of different things so that they're able to enable their current consumers to step into the world of web3 securely and then at the end of the day it's kind of growing the value of their ecosystem while the value of ledgers ecosystem grows as well I think that definitely makes sense in terms of like the next steps onto the evolution of web 2 and web3 Hardwares and I think you know at the end of the day if they do merge someday or another they will merge out

of a partnership between two manufacturers rather than one heating up the other as by sheer Innovation and you know research and development capabilities it really is a result of the fact that as you said blockchain is so different so building hardware for blockchain requires ground up thinking not to mention the amount of time it takes to develop and create Hardware right yeah I think sometimes it's easy for us to sit here because new software wallet features are launching all the time and we're like come on Ledger why is there not a phone already come on so like it does take that time but you're pursuing the unbundling of the hardware web 2 bundled everything for us and it did it in an incredible way where all of

a sudden we could do so much on our phone but in a lot of ways it went too far because it sacrificed security and it's sacrifice privacy and so we need to unbundle the tech side the hard love the shines and the terms that's actually how the evolution of the internet is it's always was like an unbundling and a rebounding and rebundling that's you know continuous cycle that we've seen with web one web two and now with web3 as well unbundling and rebundling will happen in web free I don't think we're there yet but but it will happen I hope that when it does happen it happens in a way that you know at least Ledger on an hour and I can guarantee that there will be no compromise on digital sovereignty and security because if we compromise on that core value proposition then we kind

of end up in a web 2.5 world and the web 2.5 world is interesting for now because it enables a lot of people to get into the space but we have seen the shortcomings of web 2.5 namely FDX for instance well that's the thing is that the entire point the feature that web3 gives us is self-custody and so like then all of a sudden we built a bunch of things that just ignore that feature the only point in all this is self-custody and so like even if self-custody has a way worse ux than not self-custody that's still much better because that's what we need for all the reasons like you just talked about growing up in Egypt the whole point in this thing is self-custity so the moment you get away from it it's no longer web3 and it's useless we already have good ux of

non-self-custody stuff and so the focus now is let's go and build the ability of self-custody whether that's great ux or not like I think ledgers is kind of getting us to that place but also if it's not self-custody there is no point it's just web 2. so when we talk about unbundling and bundling when we look at it from the software side how will apps work on Stacks will there be an app Marketplace will new creators be able to create apps on stacks and bundle self-custody and decentralized apps into Stacks walk us through that so you know eventually the goal is that definitely but that won't be available from the get-go the first thing is that

Stacks is obviously compatible with Ledger live Ledger live is still running on your internet connected device so web2 Hardware phone laptop but there will be apps that will be created on Ledger live that will have specific Stacks features that wouldn't be available on the Nanos for instance we'll start thinking about different the apps being developed on electric lives for specific stocks purposes and that's very exciting you know if you look at the art on stocks project it's actually a variety of different generative artists that are building generators to create outputs and these outputs will be going through resizing type of software that would resize them automatically for your Ledger Stacks create so we'll be

putting in place a variety of different tools for creators to be able to optimize their different artworks for the stack screen and then you can start imagining like a variety of different other tools for such specific Stacks use cases you know the further we go the further we will try as much as we can to half stacks as the platform like I think long-term goal is definitely for the device itself to host all of the applications right right you mentioned art and I know that you're a passionate nft collector and I think you lead The Ledger nft collection as well I believe as part of your role why do you think art is such a great onboarding ramp or a vector for web 3 adoption the answer to that is quite simple like how many

people around you are interested in finance and how many of them are interested I think Finance definitely has a lot of weight in terms of like the adoption of the space and the value that that's being created and that obviously is what's driving the spaces is finance but I think the interest from mainstream and the interest from people like me and I suppose you guys as well is culture like we live on cultures the music you listen to the art that you have on your wall the games that you play the connections that you make it's all built around culture and I think at the end of the day any technology in the past at least was adopted thanks to coach like if you think about even the best devices

that were ever Apple we were talking about Apple like apple wasn't talking about bits and processing power and members of which Microsoft was Apple was telling you a thousand songs in your pocket or it was you know telling you things that it resonated emotionally you know around creativity and around what we stand for what you know the community stands for and you know that's how Technologies get adopted is that they tend to be used in cultural contexts in which a variety of different people actually interact with the technology in order to create outputs that have an impact on much larger cohorts of people I think that when I come back to your

question like in terms of like what we do at Ledger is that we're collecting nfts from a deputy curator of The Ledger collection alongside the whole community and I think that as a security company a lot of people don't understand that you know why the hell would you collect art or why the how we connect with these and I think what's really obvious to us today is that if we're able to use you know the Brand This platform in order to first of all support different creators bring them more visibility and then become an active member in the development of this cultural ecosystem that's currently being built out in web3 it's actually not positive for the overall ecosystem and we're trying as much as we can to expand the borders of the space through culture and if you even look at like the different collabs

that we've done with our device you know we collaborate with a ton of different brands from Fendi to Hublot to YG as some of the creators or sweetie or or other creators that we worked with to design custom Hardwares that really is another kind of stepping stone towards trying to turn something that is intimidating that is considered to be too technical kind of uh not not for the mainstream use to something that's interesting and could be widely adopted by you know Main Street cultures I'm curious to get to I would go back to the ux side of things for a second because as we just said like culture is going to play such a big role here with web3 and we're going to do so much more than just

finances and I think the just a new acts of like everything you're gonna do you need to decide a transaction makes sense if it was just finances but like you just said everything's gonna go Unchained from the way we socialize the way we even probably communicate to it we collect art it probably doesn't make sense to me that we're going to sign a transaction for every single interaction we do on web3 I'm curious what Ledger is thinking about that we also have Argent coming on who is building a wallet for account abstraction right and so CK proofs they enable you to create wallets that you don't have to sign transactions it's all kind of like the blockchain side of things are just like hidden and I'm curious what your guys thoughts are on kind of where this all go is accountabraction something you guys are

thinking about or is there a different type of ux or a different idea you guys have of how we'll kind of interact with web3 I think you know interactions with web 3 at the end of the day will happen across all of these different solutions that are available to us so you still have the EOS externally owned accounts basically Ledger is one and then you're gonna have a variety of different ERC 4337 types of accounts so account of abstraction or smart wallet the core of the security of all of your accounts is going to be held by your cold water to your Ledger at the end of the day and you're it's going to be called account I might have to specify a little bit more what I mean by that because most people mistake Hardware wallets for being solely like cold wallets but then your

Hardware wallet you can actually generate multiple different accounts and the way I'd like to use the term cold account is the account that you actually never use in order to sign anything on chain you're basically using it only to store your most valuable nfts and then you might have your warm wallet you might have your mint wallet your warm wallet might be used to verify your identity on the websites that you usually interact with on a you know daily basis whereas your mint wallet is the wallet that you use in order to kind of explore those drops that things are yeah yeah we call it the YOLO wallet so at the end the YOLO wall is that he said yeah well it's culture that's culture all of

the security of those different accounts are actually independent from one another if you sign a malicious transaction using your your wallet of One impact your warm water well the only thing that would actually take away all of your assets at once is if you lose your seed phrase so that you have to keep it secure keep it offline take a picture of it don't take a picture of it sorry take a Polaroid picture of it that's a much better idea don't take a picture of it don't share it with anyone so anyway to get back to your question is what is going to be looking like in the future obviously account obstruction is going to be a huge thing but having the agency over your keys is still going to be useful because account abstraction is going to be a huge unlock for a variety of different use cases think

about blockchain gaming for instance to come back to your example you don't want to be signing a transaction there each and every single time you're picking up an item from the floor selling and Hiking someone else it will basically kill you would be signing transactions for the whole experience so account obstruction will be very interesting there because you might be able to actually program your different accounts based on the use cases that you're going to be utilizing them for so basically if you're playing a game you might give approval for three hours to approve all transactions using that specific account and it could be your real look out so that at the end of the day doesn't host any valuable assets you're basically programming an erc4337 type of account for you to be able to interact with that game but also it will enable you to give a much more

granular Vision on how you're going to be utilizing these different accounts and how you're going to program them specifically for these use cases so I think the future is basically a much more secure Hardware easy to use Hardware combined with programmable accounts for a variety of different use cases so for a lot of the like high activity things applications like let's say social or gaming account abstraction will exist instead of creating account like we do in the web 2 world where that all your info is stored on that company's database you'll just create an account abstracted smart wallet in there do all the things you need to do for a great UMX if you happen to earn something you win a championship you get a bunch of money or something you'll take that send it from that wallet to

your Ledger let's say or your true cold wallet and that's where you'll continue on with your journey of yourself sovereignty 100 if you're abstracted accounts they can be created using your Ledger in the future that that's definitely possibility as well so you'll have a mix of different types of accounts that are controlled within the same interface okay I need to ask seed phrases is this the future are we going to continue to have C phrases or does that go away so it's I don't know what it could be to something else Social account recovery or whatever does this continue to be a thing that most users like is my mom gonna have to figure out how to use a seed phrase at some point for now the main focus is to actually enable different types of recovery of

that seed phrase so in the future you know if you become really focused on that solving that issue of the seed phrase you can find a variety of different solutions but every single solution will have some sort of a drawback in terms of like giving a full ownership or partial ownership of the seed phrase to third party figuring out how you can actually do so in a way or maybe you can give it to a Smart contract but then you're also prone to Smart contract risks there are a variety of like different compromises that you need to do in order to solve that issue I think we're not the only ones to be working on solving the the seed phase issue and I think you'll have a variety of different solutions that will be available to different people depending on on how they want to be approaching it

but when we look back in 10 15 years and think about you know the day that you have to generate a seed phrase using your Ledger wallet and then note it down on the piece of paper and then hide that piece of paper somewhere and then whenever you're water broke down or or anything happen you have to take that piece of paper out and then put in only four words and have to click on two buttons and stuff like that those are those are going to be our dial up internet funny story like a few but it's not as easy to solve because there will be compromises account extraction is definitely a very interesting way to solve it but for Eos there's definitely still going to be a need to solve this in a way that doesn't compromise on security awesome one of the interesting

things to me about Stacks is that a that it stacks and you guys chose the name that pushes this use case of stacking multiple ledgers together why such a focus on stacking multiple ledgers how are you seeing your current users use Ledger and what made you want to create something that could enable multiple wallets and do you think that that's something long term that we will have multiple wallets do you think eventually it'll only be one so a lot of people use their ledgers for different purposes so there are a variety of different approaches to this you can have one Ledger per asset type so you can have a ledger for your

Bitcoins another for ethereum another for your nfts or you can have them all on one wallet and then have variety of different accounts for each one of these but I think the reality is that a lot of people actually tend to separate their assets using different seeds and different ledgers and the solution to actually enabling them to identify which is which is by being able to actually name them and actually a lot of people name their ledgers and customize them and try to you know make it feel as personal as possible because you know a decent amount of people they use their ledgers you know on a daily basis or at least on a weekly basis so providing the ability to actually name your device and

customize it and the magnet that stacking them on top of one another aside from it being pretty cool and the fact that you're playing around with them all the time it actually enables you to put them all in one place and make sure that if you're putting it in your bag or whatever closets Etc you can actually have them all stacked together so from a user experience perspective it's pretty fun most people are just putting tape on their Ledges right now and writing on the tape right and so I'm sure it's amazing how that ux is so simple it seems so obvious that we should have a name that we can see on a ledger but that was a simple thing that will make such a difference for so many of us when yeah as you said we can now stack them all together and see oh yeah

there's my Bitcoin one there's my nft there's my whatever YOLO what yeah there's my YOLO so I'm going to show for you here everybody go order pre-order your stack you can pre-order them right now I believe they start shipping in April am I correct on that mode they start stripping and towards end of April beginning of May and the thing is that the stacks is a little bit of a victim of its own success we had to close down the pre-orders because the demands can't pre-order anymore I'm pre-ordered stocks anymore however if you go to openc you can actually buy the stocks and then that can vary and because I love this space it's like it's filled you can't order it but then people are selling their order on open yes exactly so you can actually buy and buy stocks on the

secondary market and if you do own the nfds you know you'll be informed in which batch exactly where your Ledger got served but we start shipping at end of April beginning of May what a great use case for nfts though for inventories I don't know but Ledger could put a Creator royalty on that if openc allows it and now you can create additional revenue of people trading your premium pre-orders that's amazing sorry I'm going out of ramble here yeah but absolutely I think being able to utilize some of these for physical products and you know token Redemption token gated sorry Services through the actual ownership of that you know nft if you think about like what could be unlocked in terms of like owning the stocks nft and then being able to access a specific accessory because you have it or being able to access specific you know service

that would only be available to the people that actually own the stocks honesty is definitely something that's super interesting so we're trying to explore that a little bit more with with what's going to be happening with like Ledger show becoming a little bit more of a web 3 type of experience with token gated experiences Etc so definitely looking forward to that as well do you guys think of what you're building with Ledger as like a new form of browser almost like I think of a browser is what it allows me to go and interact with like web 2 apps or web 2 websites and like kind of what you guys are building with Ledger is like the thing that allows me to go and interact with web 3 or dapps it's almost like a browser but a little bit different I guess it's the browser of value instead of a browser of

information I don't know but is that something you guys see this as too I've never thought of it this way but it's definitely interesting I would say it's more of a key that enables you to access right okay browsers and the different interfaces obviously not with Ledger extension and Ledger live you do have a little bit of that browser feeling but you know Ledger has made me focused on being the secure Gateway but then you know at the end of the day you can interact with a variety of different browsers and interfaces in order to do whatever it is that you want to be doing in the space okay before we wrap up Mo I know you've been working a lot on Ledger Quest and I want to give you a chance to tell the users a little bit about Ledger Quest because it's such an incredible

tool for education so many of our users are trying to learn about the space and this is definitely something that they should know about and be checking out so tell us about it sure you know Ledger Quest is really an attempt at trying to make sure that web free education is part of the web 3 experience right because if you think about it a lot of people come into the space and we were talking about that earlier but if you come into the space for the first time you're mostly coming in out of fomo because some friend told you that you had to buy this nft or you needed to act fast and do this and that but most of the time you know education isn't really part of your priorities you create an account you fight rft and then you know you'll start thinking about

whatever it is that you need to be learning about in order to secure assets when you hear about a scammer hack or God forbid you get hacked or scam trying to make sure that people can get educated very early on while the experience web 3 is really really important you were talking about that before we started recording but in Ledger you know we've built a whole educational ecosystem starting with Ledger Academy which is like our educational platform and hosts you know variety of different content formats it covers a ton of topics and it's really like the web 2 experience of web3 education so it's basically website you can listen to podcasts watch videos read articles Etc but then when you think about it it's a pretty passive type of experience and it's not really connected

to web3 yet so what we're trying to do with Quest is that we're trying to bridge the two so you'd be learning about a topic on Ledger Academy let's say private key security and then once you're done with the article you'll have come some sort of a call to action that takes you to Quest where you might you know end up Landing Quest right away either ways and Quest is really an application layer a tech stack on top of which you can build different Learn to Earn curriculums we have our own curriculums they're called Academy quests it goes as follows you can basically log in with your wallet you learn about a variety of different topics you then start your quest which is a multiple choice question experience if you successfully complete it you get to claim a free proof of knowledge nft that nft as your on-chain certification

it's non-transferable and as functions to cruise knowledge but its form could be anything and that's the fun part it could be metaverse wearable it could be collectible it could be an artwork it could be a message so you're doing is that you are actually getting into the space learning about it you have an incentive which is that certification but that incentive could then be used in a variety of different other environments so your certification could be a collectible that's a beanie that you're gonna wear in the sandbox and that if you wear that beanie in the sandbox you're actually going to be able to unlock different levels of a game that if you hadn't done that education experience you would have been able to

access people to learn and to experience web3 and that's you know very interesting because then it's not only about passive education it's about interactive medication that leads you into the space in a variety of different ways another very interesting thing and I'll finish on that is that we have our own Academy Quest but lead request is also built for the community so what we're doing today is that we're working with a variety of different partners you know namely word of women Cool Cuts apcoin that follows lucidia and some others that I can't mention right now that will be announcing soon and they've actually utilized their Tech stack to build their own curriculums these experiences are actually talking dated to their holders and for instance in the case of word of

women and they they were launch partners and you know went great we've built a whole education campaign around their Quest starting with education workshops Twitter spaces quote creation of content Etc to get their communities ready for the quest then the community ended up doing the quest getting the proof of knowledge of T and if she had the proof of knowledge nft you could go to the Token gated shop Ledger still can get a job and claim a free custom word of women ledger so it took you from you know learning to experiencing to getting your first digital asset your first sold bound tokens at least and then claiming a free device which is about because I think most people won't just go and take a course on self-custody most people just don't get it and so unless it's

something you learned in school you're probably not going to go spend your weekend learning about self-custody mainstream people obviously many listeners here do just who care but I think when you go past early adopters I'm not gonna care and so you gotta tie some sort of incentive so I think it's super smart and so instead of the call to action of go and pre-order your voice I'm gonna be a cafe and complete that that's when you call to action today yeah I mean Academy quests we have about a couple that are currently online and then we'll have a full Curriculum by the end of April this is the basic track that we've currently developing but then we'll have like more specialized tracks and like nfts D5 AI learning about like specific topics and we'll try as much as we can to make it as gamified as

possible whereas like usually complete two different tracks you unlock different perks and access like product Services experiences whether they be IRL or in the minivers so education can be fun he said great line okay before we wrap up I just want to ask you a couple speed round questions but I want to give you a chance is there anything else that you want to show or you want to tell people to direct their attention to honestly no apart from you know just telling the people that are out there today during this bear Market that this is an amazing opportunity for them learn more and to experience the space and ways that a lot of people in the future are not going to

be able to experience it chill sit back don't be stressed I see a lot of stress in the space unlike people very dense because obviously those are hard times but I kind of like the Burma to be honest you get the time to think about the future you get the time to strategize and also kind of washing away all of the fluffy stuff that didn't belong here in the first place all of the things that didn't really have a strong foundation so it's a kind of a natural selection of the good stuff so just stick around learn take your time and enjoy it that's the main thing that like to chill I appreciate that everyone needs that okay a few just quick questions uh have some fun at the end here typically the question I ask is what's an nft you'll never sell but since you are so active in The Ledger

nft collection I want to flip that question and I want to ask you what's a new project that you guys have purchased or added to the collection and new as a relative term it could be in the last six months but something a project that you're excited about I'd have to say art blocks like we want a lot of fnr block species and I think you know hard plugs is such a fascinating project when people think about generative arts in the future they'll think about the first outputs that were generated in the 50s and the 60s by people like veramonar and Herbert Frank and then they'll go directly to artworks like artworks will have a shop where in the art history book and why because nfds were mainly used as vehicles of distribution of

different artworks rather than being the medium for the artistic creation itself right he had different artists taking care pictures like photographers illustrators Etc and then linking it to the token and selling that artwork via the token itself whereas with art blocks what's that happening and obviously art blocks isn't the first generative art project you had larva labs and autoglyphs before but I would say art blocks is really what they can generate the art to the next stage the nft itself is the media so it's the code being written on the NFD that enables your screen or your browser to actually render that and for you to be able to see that the artwork so in terms of like a massive shift and you know if you think of artistic mediums you start with stone sculpture then you end up with the

cameras paintings and then you go to you know photography basically the camera wasn't really invented for art it was invented for journalists you know and covering War then artists started creating art with it and then you think about code code wasn't necessarily designed for artistic creation but then if you think about all of these mediums basically their premise wasn't to create art but then artists started using these different mediums in order to express themselves Creed okay I know you're a big electronic music fan so I'm gonna ask a non-web three question here best concert you've seen recently or concert you're most excited for that's coming up that's a very complicated question best concrete I've seen recently or best concert that I'm very much looking

forward to so I don't really go to concerts I'm more of a club type of person I like clubs more than big concerts it's more intimate Etc and I really love what a amsterdam-based label has been doing recently it's called vbx not very famous but it's more like a 90s so they're like to get back to something that we were saying earlier is like about how culture is actually you know being developed and preserved with time recent labels have been doing is that they've been trying to preserve as much as they could the sound of the 90s so the sound of the 90s is so interesting when you think about electronic music production for a variety of different reasons mainly because few machine started to merge so we started hearing sounds that you couldn't hear before but second is because everything had to be

pressed it wasn't there's there wasn't abundance there was scarcity in what you could hear and today with the abundance of digitization the sounds are all kind of the same because it's all some sort of like a huge Melting Pot and then everything data driven so the radio stations only put the stuff that I've worked before so this you kind of start hearing the same thing all over again and that's obviously impacted electronic music as well when I think of electronic music I'm more of an underground type of guy so like I don't think of David Guetta or Martin Garrix or whatever for respect to these guys they're from great but anyways what I'm trying to kind of explain here is that these labels do vinyl only sets and the DJs they come with their vinyls and these vinyls have passed in the 90s or at least some of

them are produced today but with an inspiration from the sound of the nine people and I think that's super inspiring and I draw a lot of parallels between generative art and electronic music like you think about it they're both dialogues between between humans and machines that lead to unexpected creative outcomes both of them are pretty underground and the generative Arts base as an artist you don't necessarily have to box yourself you can be whoever you want your identity there's this community based culture and values and it's kind of same in electronic music space like you know there are no like biases that are linked to who you are as a person and then it's just fun it's kind of you know exploring what technology and culture can do together it was a great answer much better than my question you took that in

a great Direction okay I'll ask a bunch of links the two questions together yeah incredible if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it well if I have to take a couple of seconds to think about this I would just write something that would connect all of these people together I think today we're not empathetic enough I would write empathy on it everyone's stuck in their own journey and being the protagonist of their own life and movie and this one you kind of take a step back and you think about while we're here in the first place you know we don't even know where we're here in the first place um it's humanity and what is the cosmos and Homo sapiens have been there for 150 000 years the planet has been theirs for

billions of years so we're basically a second in the life of a planet and then when you put that into perspective you kind of realize that the only important thing in this life or at least most people when they get old and when you kind of start visualizing how or you're going to be thinking about when you're basically at the last moments of your life is going to be the connections and people that you met and how you wear as a person and not how much money you made there the house you have or the car or whatever you know I'm not saying that these are things that you shouldn't really try to accomplish in terms of like the things that make you happy and I'm not saying that a Lamborghini wouldn't make you happy but I'm just saying that we need a little bit more

empathy so I think the human connections and understanding how to keep developing that in a digital world and in a world where technology is progressing so rapidly is really really important Beautiful Finish I love that he took that path to it it's a wonderful message for everybody Mo it's been an absolute Delight thank you so much for the time thanks to you and the whole team that ledger for everything you guys are doing for the space deep thou much appreciated thanks for having me a great conversation guys I'm happy to do this anytime in the future awesome thanks so much for listening and everybody have yourself a great week thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial

advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one