Security is key to financial transactions on the blockchain, says Fmr. Apple Executive Tony Fadell

Joining me now are Tony Fidel and Ledger CEO, Pascal Gauthier. Welcome guys. Tony, good to see you again. So tell me, crypto wallets, okay, I'm sort of supposing maybe this is for everything but Bitcoin, because you can buy Bitcoin in your Fidelity account nowadays, but this, in a way, for those who are crypto-uninitiated, might seem like a throwback to earlier days before there were more different ways to buy it. Why is this important, particularly from a security point of view? Pascal, take it away. Well, so, look, cryptocurrency, it's about a secret. You own a secret. It's a cryptographic secret, and actually that secret is everything. If you share the secret, it's no longer a secret. Your money is gone. Ledger and secure hardware is the only way to really make sure today that you don't compromise on your security, both when your coins are at rest, but also when you engage and you want to make transactions. And so this is why the success of Ledger today, we have reinvented cybersecurity to protect online secrets and cryptocurrency is how we started. So Tony, what made you want to design something like this, which is, you know, certainly a niche product in the sense that not everybody has enough crypto to want to need to protect it this way? Well, specifically in this case, you know, the hardware that I saw before joining Ledger, you know, and working with them four years ago was it was really arcane. It reminded me of MP3 players back before the iPod, and I saw an absolute need for reinvention of that. And that's why I went after the Ledger Stacks and helped to design that and put that together for Ledger. But really, you're going to find out more and more that your smartphone can get hacked. Those private keys that people are using to open up their software wallets can be hacked. Ledger is the only device and the reason why I joined them was over 10 years, the devices from Ledger have not been hacked. And that's a special thing to really understand. Security is key and paramount when you're doing financial transactions on the blockchain. Pascal, there are a lot of different, certainly, currencies on the blockchain and a lot of financial transactions happening on phones. How broad is your ambition for this product? Look, you know, we think that cyber security will be a bigger problem next year, a bigger problem the year after. And we also think that we will become tokenized beings, meaning that you will own more digital stuff tomorrow. And so the combination of these two factors means that everybody will need to upgrade their security. And I think right now, you know, you say that it feels niche tomorrow. I think that everyone will be concerned by the security because it's not just your money that will go on the blockchain, but also your identity and everything that has value for you and that makes you a digital being. So we think this is really big and this is why I need Tony's help at the board now, you know, after we design the product together, to come and help me because this is no small deal and we want to build a very big company.