L’Agefi: On the occasion of the 8th edition of BpiFrance Inno Generation, the Minister of Digital Jean-Noël Barrot illustrated the “digital makeoverfrom France to emphasize the importance of Ledger for the city of Vierzon. Ledger is becoming more and more international, what does this city represent to you today?
Pascal Gauthier: That’s about a hundred jobs. Vierzon is currently our logistics center but also our assembly center. But tomorrow it will be less, especially as we will increase the production of our products abroad; in Vietnam, Taiwan or Poland.
Today we send all our digital wallets from Vierzon. 20% of FedEx packages going to the United States from France are digital Ledger wallets. Vierzon is a dry port, the 7th in France. We also have developers there.
How do you explain the recent massive hacks that have hit the crypto ecosystem in recent months?
Computer security requires a lot of research and development and must be constantly updated. For example, the hack that Binance fell victim to was of a very high level. Today even states like North Korea do it and in these cases it is much more difficult to find the money, sometimes impossible.
Then there is clearly negligence. Some developers have no idea what computer security is. It is also a matter of maturity and insurance of ecosystems. Today, there is too little insurance in the crypto ecosystem.
Is this damaging to the reputation of the democratization of the crypto ecosystem?
Where there is money, there are thieves. Just look at the sum of what is stolen from the interbank group every year. Perfect security does not exist. But to take advantage of the best tomorrow, you need a Ledger: we have that ambition. Today we are the best in the world at providing security in the crypto ecosystem. Our model is even more intrusive with the news regarding platforms exploding in flight such as Celsius Network where the user loses possession of their money. And in the future, a lot of business will be developed around this, especially with the identity that can be tokenized.
Is tokenized identity your next market?
Yes, the combination of money and identity is the future of the physical wallet, the hardware wallet in crypto jargon. Today, the physical wallets we all carry in our pockets are impractical and unsafe. To fill this, it will be necessary to dematerialize them into an elegant product. We master the entire value chain, both technological and marketing, to do this. There is no reason why Americans can do great business and we can’t. Our ambition goes far beyond crypto. We want to provide a solution that will be a kind of everyday companion for users.
Do you want to become the reference in the field of security for institutions alongside individuals?
Right now, most major companies don’t have many use cases with crypto yet, but it’s only a matter of time. To compare with the development of the Internet, we are in the mid-1990s for crypto, which is still an activity today.”geekApple’s iPhone changed the user experience of mobile internet because it managed to simplify everything. The crypto works properly when it passes the same milestone.
Is France equipped to face the struggle of talents with the development of this industry?
Yes, we have some of the best developers, financiers, engineers. We’ve got a good card to play, especially since this is the first time there’s been an internet revolution and the biggest companies aren’t American. Binance, BitMex or even FTX are not American even though Samuel Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX, and they were founded in jurisdictions that were previously completely improbable for web companies. This means that talent can be recruited from anywhere in the world. The world is no longer necessarily dependent on Silicon Valley at this point. For example, there is Sorare [jeu de carte à jouer, ndlr] or Kaiko [spécialisée dans la data crypto] that are becoming important players at the global level.
Are you a profitable business today?
There is no absolute profitability or non-profitability. It is really a matter of the maturity of a company, of the investments that are made. Ledger generates very good margins. Plus, in this industry, it’s impossible to make funding rounds like ours if we hadn’t been profitable from the start. Most successful companies like FTX or Coinbase turned profitable very quickly because at the time investors didn’t know how to identify crypto’s use cases and didn’t necessarily accept that they had been spending at a loss for so long.