Crypto wallet company Ledger has unveiled its latest, Bluetooth-enabled Nano X device Sunday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The added Bluetooth implies that the Nano X can quickly be used with mobile devices, which has been a nuisance for numerous clients of the company’s current wallet, the Ledger S. Much of the world basically uses mobile phone, never or extremely rarely using laptops or desktop computers.
While giving a demonstration of the device, Ledger CEO Eric Larchevêque said “The fact that we have a mobile application and it works with the Nano X is really the big evolution of the hardware for this lineup.”
By linking the Nano X via Bluetooth, it’s possible to realize the safety of Ledger but with mobile’s form factor, Larchevêque said. (Ledger gadgets store keys but an outside application on a computing device is necessary to save and perform transactions.) Larchevêque wasn’t prepared to commit to a price for the Nano X but he did reveal that when it goes live, the price of the Nano S will decline (it currently sells for $69.99). According to the Ledger website, more than 1.3 million Nano S gadgets have been sold.
There’s more to the latest gadget, too. It has a somewhat bigger display, for example. (With such a minute screen, every additional pixel makes a difference in ease of use.) The screen is significant because Ledger’s approach to safety requires that several activities are performed on the hardware gadget itself.
“It’s a more advanced device,” Larchevêque said of the Nano X.
The Ledger Live mobile app can be downloaded from Google Play and iTunes on January 16, according to Ledger. To that end, it also offers additional memory, which might not appear that valuable for a hardware wallet at the face of it. After all, it’s merely storing public private key pairs for every cryptocurrency a client holds, is it not?
The answer is ‘no’. It turns out that as fresh tokens turn the entire crypto ecosystem further complex, it becomes essential for diverse software to act together with various protocols. To uphold Ledger’s towering security measures, the company made the conclusion that each set of rules has to contain its own app for transmitting and receiving coins.
Larchevêque said “We have lots of third-party developers who are developing applications. We want to make sure that these applications can only sign transactions for their own private key.”
This has an extra benefit, Larchevêque said. It implies that a client with one app open can’t inadvertently sign a transaction to the incorrect protocol. The Ledger Nano X can hold the apps for as many as 100 crypto assets, a six-fold rise over the Nano S. Ledger is turning heads by introducing its latest gadget at CES.
“It’s true that CES is not a crypto show,” Larchevêque said, recognizing that his company has left the blockchain bubble with this emergence, but he points out that Ledger has gotten into the hands of numerous users at this point to still be seen as a niche device. CES appears to have welcomed the French company into the broader world of consumer electronics. According to a press release from Ledger, CES awarded the Nano X with its 2019 “Innovation Award in Cyber Security and Personal Privacy.”
Larchevêque concluded saying
“When you have more than a million customers you are really in consumer electronics.”
