Ledger’s chief innovation officer and co-founder Nicolas Bacca will leave the company following its recent Recover feature scandal. He follows former CEO and co-founder Eric Larchevêque, who stepped down in 2019.
According to a close friend, Bacca will helm a new project to onboard more users to crypto. He said that while Ledger was a good starting point in promoting self-custody to the public, it was only the tip of the iceberg.
Bacca’s Career Points to a Future in Advancing Self-Custody
Bacca served as the company’s chief technology officer before taking on the role of chief innovation officer in 2019. Under his watch, the company developed and sold $6 million of its famous Nano wallets.
Interested in keeping control of your own crypto? Read our comparison between Ledger and Trezor wallets here.
While he hasn’t publicly announced his next position, Bacca’s LinkedIn profile suggests he is currently involved with Ubinity, a company that designs and implements secure modules for smart cards. He also co-founded BTChip to develop an open-source secure element hardware wallet that led to the first version of Ledger.
Given Ledger’s recent attempt to make its wallet more user-friendly through a panned recovery feature, it seems natural the entrepreneur would harness his experience to develop a product that further simplifies secure crypto access. He may also pursue projects with companies he has invested in, such as Bitcoin neobank Bitstack, Morpho, a DeFi peer-to-peer lending service built on lending protocols, and the Mixed Martial Arts NFT video game MetaFight.
Ledger Treads Fine Line Between Usability and Self-Sovereignty
During Bacca’s tenure, Ledger released a widely-mocked subscription service that allowed users to recover a seed phrase, a group of 24 words used to reconstruct keys. Diehards said it undermined crypto’s ethos of self-sovereignty and criticized Ledger for focusing on its artistic and business sides rather than crypto.
Learn more about the differences between online wallets and cold wallets like Ledger here.
In response, Ledger’s CEO Pascal Gauthier promised to open-source more of Ledger’s code. He blamed the Recover melee on an “unintentional communication mistake,” but also affirmed how important key recovery was to onboard users who find the task of managing keys too daunting.
Ledger wallets store crypto keys on a physical device that can be taken offline to protect funds. Users must connect the wallet to their computer to carry out blockchain transactions.
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