The Hardware Wallet Maker Ledger Is Redefining Digital Identity Protection

With bitcoin soaring and AI threats escalating, the Paris-based hardware wallet maker is leveraging its lead in crypto security to redefine digital identity protection, setting its sights on a larger market.

As cryptocurrency soars and AI threats escalate, Ledger, a Paris-based hardware wallet maker, is leveraging its lead in crypto security to redefine digital identity protection, setting its sights on a larger market.

Nina Bambysheva, Forbes Staff

Bitcoin’s rally from $68,000 to $98,000 over the past two weeks has pushed Ledger’s hardware sales up threefold, while transactions on Ledger Live, its service for buying, swapping and staking crypto and NFTs, surged 3.5x.

But Pascal Gauthier, Ledger’s 48-year-old CEO, is thinking bigger. “Cryptocurrency is at the heart of what we do, but we are becoming—we always were, but it's going to be more obvious to the public—much more of a cybersecurity company,” he says.

This ambition puts Ledger on a collision course with tech behemoths like Apple and Google, whose password management services like iCloud Keychain and Google Password Manager are widely used. But smartphones, for all their ubiquity, have fundamental security flaws, argues Gauthier. And popular software wallets like MetaMask or Phantom? “A terrible choice for security,” he says bluntly. “People with real money in the space understand this.”

The company has raised $600 million in funding, including a $380 million Series C in 2021 that valued the company at $1.5 billion, and a $108 million extension in early 2023 at the same valuation. It claims to have sold more than 7 million devices across 210 countries, securing around 20% of the world’s crypto—no less than $400 billion, based on Forbes’ estimates. And despite a year-long delay in launching Ledger Stax, its first device designed by iPod designer and founder of Nest Labs Tony Fadell with sleek Apple-like aesthetics, Ledger says it’s on track to hit $1 billion in cumulative 10-year revenue (the company says it's profitable but won’t disclose specifics).

Hardware still anchors Ledger’s business, but services are driving much of its recent growth. Ledger Live, a mobile app for buying, swapping, and staking crypto and NFTs, and Ledger Enterprise, a platform for businesses self-custodying digital assets, now account for nearly half of the company’s expansion. The strategy is clear: diversify beyond hardware as competition heats up—not just from rivals like Prague-based hard wallet maker Trezor but from centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, which have millions of crypto-owning customers and continue to be the default choice for investors.

“When the bear market hit in 2022-2023, the question was do you fire everybody, stop doing everything, protect cash and wait for the market to come back, or do you keep investing? We decided to keep investing,” recalls Gauthier. “My board asked me several times if I was sure, but I was because you want to be positioned at the beginning of the bull run with all sales open, meaning you have products to sell.”

And Ledger is moving beyond crypto, aiming to redefine digital security. Its newest feature, Ledger Sync, launched last month, tackles a familiar vulnerability: the reliance on centralized servers to store passwords and emails. Sync shifts control back to users, generating encryption keys directly on their Ledger devices—keys even the company cannot access.

In September, the firm launched another ambitious product, Security Key—an app that allows you to use your Ledger device with websites that support passkeys, which are generated by biometrics like fingerprints or facial recognition, or through multi-factor authentication (MFA). Security Key marks Ledger’s entry into the authentication market, projected to reach $40 billion by the end of the decade, and its response to a growing problem: the rise of AI-generated hacks and digital identity fraud.

“The cold storage crypto wallet market is limited, probably a few hundred million dollars,” says Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer. “The authentication market is multiples larger.”

Ledger’s premium wallet, Stax, features the first-ever secure E-Ink touchscreen powered by the Secure Element chip—the same technology used in bank cards and biometric passports to resist physical and remote attacks.

Ledger’s pitch is that its devices are more than just hardware—they’re a platform for building an ecosystem of secure services. Unlike software-first solutions, Ledger’s hardware generates encryption keys offline, mitigating risks of remote compromise. “Your Ledger could be something that gets you through borders in the future, and then the total addressable market becomes much bigger,” says Gauthier.

Ledger’s ascent hasn’t been without turbulence. Last year, its rollout of Ledger Recover, a feature designed for users anxious about losing their seed phrases, sparked a fierce backlash. The service, which allows account recovery through ID verification with partner Onfido, was seen by some critics as