- The Ledger Nano Gen5 will sell for $179.
- Susan Kare, original creator of the Macintosh iconography, helps launch.
- The unveiling of its new portfolio coincides with a renewed interest in institutions.
More than a decade after launching its first hardware wallet, Ledger is rolling out its latest model.
Launched Thursday, the Ledger Nano Gen5 features many of the same features as the company’s suite of hardware wallets, including an e-ink display, secure signature, and tap-to-unlock support via a near-field communication protocol.
Priced at $179 retail, the device also comes with Ledger’s security key, a physical device about the size of a credit card that can be used in place of a seed phrase to unlock the wallet.
Susan Kare, the original creator of the Apple Macintosh iconography, also designed an exclusive series of small clip-on badges to personalize the hardware wallet.
Hang out with the old man
Launched in 2016, Ledger has become one of the largest hardware wallet providers in the industry, with over 8 million devices sold in over 160 different countries.
More than 20% of cryptocurrencies on the market are secured by a Ledger device, according to the company.
The latest release comes four months after the Paris-based company announced it would stop offering security and software updates for its Ledger Nano S device, launched in 2016.
Charles Guillemet, Ledger’s chief technology officer, said in June that the device’s limited memory at a time when cryptography was developing rapidly was a significant constraint.
“Like any consumer technology, there comes a time when developing updates is no longer feasible, in which case we will notify people well in advance of any interruption in updates,” said Ariel Wengroff, executive vice president of marketing and communications at Ledger. DL News.
Wengroff declined to comment on how long Ledger would offer support for the Ledger Nano Gen 5, or whether other products would be deprecated.
Ledger goes multi-signature
The device’s launch coincides with renewed interest in Ledger’s growing enterprise business.
Led by Sébastien Badault, Ledger Enterprise was launched five years ago to provide treasury management services to hedge funds, decentralized autonomous organizations and more traditional financial institutions.
“A lot of family offices or large companies have said, ‘We love your products. It’s really great, but we can’t have one person holding the keys because there are multiple owners, and we can’t have a single point of failure,” Badault said. DL News.
Nowadays, while crypto is on a strong rise thanks to the passage of pro-industry laws in the United States, institutional demand for crypto products has been much higher, Badault said.
On Thursday, Ledger revealed the launch of a multi-signature product to meet this new demand. Multi-signature crypto wallets allow multiple users to jointly manage a pool of cryptocurrencies.
Ledger Multisig is built using the open source architecture of smart contract wallet provider Safe.
It also allows users to see the full address of a transaction before signing it, a feature the company calls Clear Signing.
“That was the main problem with Bybit for example or with Swissborg,” Wengroff said. DL Newsreferring to the monumental hacks that hit key crypto projects this year.
“They signed blind deals and lost millions, if not billions of dollars.”
Liam Kelly is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in Berlin. Do you have any advice? Contact us at liam@dlnews.com.
