- The Ledger Nano Gen5 will sell for $179.
- Susan Kare, an original designer of the Macintosh iconography, is contributing to the launch.
- Its newest wallet unveiling coincides with a renewed focus on institutions.
More than a decade after issuing its first hardware wallet, Ledger is rolling out its latest model.
Released on Thursday, the Ledger Nano Gen5 features many of the same features as the company’s suite of hardware wallets, including an e-ink screen, secure signing, and tap-to-unlock support via a near-field communication protocol.
At $179 retail, the device also comes with Ledger’s security key, a physical device roughly the size of a credit card that can be used in lieu of a seed phrase to unlock the wallet.
Susan Kare, the original designer of the Apple Macintosh’s iconography, also designed an exclusive series of small clip-on badges to personalise the hardware wallet.
Out with the old
Launched in 2016, Ledger has emerged as one of the industry’s largest hardware wallet providers with more than 8 million devices sold to over 160 different countries.
Over 20% of the market’s cryptocurrencies 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 to its Ledger Nano S device, which was launched in 2016.
Charles Guillemet, Ledger’s chief technology officer, said in June that the device’s limited memory at a time when crypto was growing rapidly was a significant constraint.
“Like all consumer tech, there comes a point where developing updates is no longer feasible, in which case we will inform people well in advance of any cessation of updates,” Ariel Wengroff, the executive vice president of marketing and communications at Ledger, told DL News.
Wengroff declined to comment on how long Ledger would offer support for the Ledger Nano Gen 5, nor whether other products would be deprecated.
Ledger goes multi-sig
The device launch coincides with renewed focus on Ledger’s growing enterprise business.
Led by Sebastien Badault, Ledger Enterprise launched five years ago to provide treasury management services for hedge funds, decentralised autonomous organisations, and more traditional financial institutions.
“A lot of family offices or bigger companies said, ‘we love your products. It’s really great, but we cannot have one person holding the keys because there are multiple owners, and we cannot have one single point of failure,’” Badault told DL News.
These days, with crypto riding high on the back of pro-industry legislation passing in the US, 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-sig crypto wallets enable multiple users to manage a pool of cryptocurrencies jointly.
Ledger Multisig is built using the open-source architecture from the smart contract wallet provider Safe.
It also lets users see the entire address of a transaction before signing it, a feature the company calls Clear Signing.
“This was the main issue with Bybit for example or with Swissborg,” Wengroff told DL News, referring to monumental hacks that hit key crypto projects this year.
“They blind signed transactions and lost millions to billions of dollars.”
Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.