🫡 Freedom to HODL

Bitcoin means a lot of things these days, but at its core, it represents the freedom to hold and move money without asking permission. 

You only get that if you hold your own keys, something Charles Guillemet, Ledger’s CTO, knows everything about.

On today’s Supply Shock podcast, Guillemet told Rizzo he estimates that Ledger devices secure around 20% of the total crypto market cap right now.

Still, anyone intending to self-custody will have to grapple with how to keep their seed phrases safe, which is an obvious barrier.

Despite multiple pushes to devise alternative no-seed solutions — multisigs and social recovery mechanisms — Guillemet believes seed phrases are here to stay. Most people are fine with a single hardware wallet plus solid backups.

“The problem I see today with multi-sigs is that it’s really for power users,” Guillemet said. “You don’t really have a very friendly user interface to implement it and so on, and this is something we are thinking about — making multisig easy for everyone.”

“But at the end, if you’re on your own and you only secure like $200, on your hardware, you might not need a multi-sig because it will be too complex. And when it's too complex, you have more room to make mistakes. So it’s always a balance between how much value you secure and how simple your setup [is].”

As for how hardware wallets will evolve, Guillemet envisions bigger screens that clearly show what you’re signing, plus a pre-sign transaction check that flags risky interactions. He notes we’re still a while yet from having truly secure hardware wallets in the same device as our smartphones.

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

This newsletter was created with assistance from AI tooling.

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