Ledger IPO: A Black Comedy About “Security”
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Ledger IPO: A Black Comedy About “Security”
A company whose core selling point is “security” historically faces its greatest risk exposure precisely from security issues.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Ada, TechFlow
At dawn on January 21, 2025, in the central French town of Méreau.
David Balland was dragged from his home in his sleep. He is the co-founder of Ledger, a cryptocurrency hardware wallet company that claims to safeguard $10 billion worth of Bitcoin for users worldwide.
According to France’s Le Monde newspaper, 48 hours later, when France’s elite special forces unit GIGN stormed the premises, Balland had already lost one finger.
The kidnappers sent a video of the severed finger to Éric Larchevêque, Ledger’s other co-founder, along with a message: “Payment only in cryptocurrency—no police involvement, no delays, or consequences will follow.”
A year later, Ledger announced plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, with a valuation exceeding $4 billion. Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Barclays—the most prominent names on Wall Street—are all backing it.
This is a business built on “security.”
Is that ironic?
The Leaked Addresses
Let’s rewind to 2020.
That summer, a misconfigured API endpoint gave attackers easy access to Ledger’s e-commerce database. Over one million email addresses were exposed. Worse still, the names, phone numbers, and home addresses of 272,000 customers were also leaked.
Six months later, this list surfaced on the hacker forum Raidforums and was sold at a nominal price—freely accessible to anyone.
You can imagine what followed.
Fishing emails flooded in like snowflakes, luring Ledger users to download malicious links in hopes of stealing their private keys and accessing their crypto. Some Ledger users even received emails threatening to visit their homes and steal their cryptocurrency unless they paid a ransom—emails that included their real names and addresses.
Yet Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier stated the company would not compensate customers whose personal data—including home addresses—had been leaked on hacker sites.
This incident dealt Ledger a significant blow. But the true cost was borne by users who continue living in fear to this day.
So—did Ledger learn its lesson?
Falling into the Same Hole—Three Times
On December 14, 2023, Ledger ran into trouble again.
This time, the attack vector was even more absurd: A former Ledger employee fell victim to a phishing attack, allowing hackers to gain access to his NPMJS account.
No one explained how long he’d been gone—or why a departed employee retained access privileges to critical systems.
Malicious code was injected into Ledger Connect Kit, a core library relied upon by countless DeFi applications. SushiSwap, Zapper, Phantom, Balancer—the front ends across the entire DeFi ecosystem—instantly became phishing pages.
Ledger patched the issue within 40 minutes—but $600,000 had already vanished.
In his post-incident statement, CEO Pascal Gauthier wrote: “This was an unfortunate, isolated incident.”
Isolated?
Then, just two weeks before Ledger announced its IPO plan on January 5, 2026, another leak occurred—this time through Global-e, its third-party payment processor. Customer names and contact information leaked once more.
Six years. Three major breaches.
Each labeled an “isolated incident.” Each blamed on a “third party.” Yet every time, users bore the consequences.
If a traditional financial institution suffered three security incidents over six years, regulators would have revoked its license long ago. In crypto, however, it can still pursue an IPO—and triple its valuation.
Recover: A Public Betrayal
If data breaches could be chalked up to accidents or negligence, then Ledger Recover was a deliberate self-detonation.
In May 2023, Ledger launched a new service: For $9.99 per month, users could encrypt and split their recovery phrase across three companies—Ledger, Coincover, and EscrowTech. If users forgot their phrase, they could recover it simply by presenting government-issued ID.
To ordinary users perpetually anxious about losing their recovery phrase, this sounded reassuring.
But there’s a fundamental problem: The entire premise of the hardware wallet business rests on one principle—“private keys never leave the device.”
Ledger’s former CEO Larchevêque later admitted an unsettling truth on Reddit: If users enabled Recover, governments could legally compel these three companies to surrender their key shards—and thereby seize user assets.
The community erupted. Photos of users burning their Ledger devices appeared on Twitter.
Mudit Gupta, Chief Information Security Officer at Polygon, tweeted: “Anything protected solely by ‘identity verification’ is inherently insecure—because identity is trivial to fake.”
Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of Binance, asked: “Does this mean cold wallet recovery phrases can now be decoupled from the device?”—calling it antithetical to core principles embraced by the crypto community.
Ledger’s response? “The vast majority of current crypto users still rely on exchanges or software wallets with limited security to hold their assets. For many, managing a 24-word recovery phrase remains an insurmountable hurdle—meaning paper backups are becoming obsolete.”
That’s factually correct. But when a company’s growth strategy requires diluting its most fundamental value proposition, things get delicate.
Ledger’s longtime users are geeks. Geeks are meticulous. Geeks are vocal. Geeks write long Reddit posts criticizing you. But their wallets are already purchased—and they don’t drive growth.
Growth comes from newcomers. Newcomers hate hassle. Newcomers will pay $9.99 for peace of mind. Newcomers don’t care about technicalities like “private keys never leave the device.”
But this isn’t a trade-off between security and convenience.
It’s a public betrayal of core users—trading their trust for a ticket to a larger market.
The Wrench Attack
Let’s return to David Balland’s severed finger.
The crypto industry has a term: the “wrench attack.” It means no matter how sophisticated the cryptography or how decentralized the protocol, nothing stops someone from standing in front of you with a wrench and demanding your private key.
The term sounds almost darkly humorous—as if invented by programmers sketching threat models on whiteboards as a joke.
But when it actually happens, it’s anything but funny.
In December 2024, Belgian crypto influencer Stéphane Winkel’s wife was kidnapped. In May 2025, the father of another crypto billionaire lost a finger. Balland’s case is merely part of a broader trend.
A French internal security expert told reporters: “The modus operandi in these cases is identical. Whether it’s the same group remains under investigation—but one thing is certain: This industry has become a hunting ground for professional kidnappers.”
The question is: Where do the target lists come from?
The 270,000 home addresses leaked in 2020 remain actively traded on the dark web. That wasn’t just any data dump. It was a verified list marked “holds cryptocurrency,” with rough estimates of asset size deducible from the Ledger model purchased. Those buying the most expensive models were likely the largest holders.
In a sense, Balland’s ordeal was a fruit sown by Ledger itself.
That may sound overly harsh—after all, Ledger didn’t hand over the data to kidnappers. But when a company whose core selling point is “security” fails to protect its customers’ home addresses, it becomes difficult to claim zero responsibility.
The Logic Behind $4 Billion
Having dwelled on the negatives, let’s now examine why Wall Street remains willing to back Ledger.
The answer is one word: FTX.
In November 2022, FTX collapsed—its $32 billion valuation evaporating overnight. Hundreds of thousands of users saw their assets frozen in that black hole, still unrecovered today.
The oft-repeated slogan—“Not your keys, not your coins”—suddenly became a bloody, visceral lesson.
But demand for hardware wallets soared afterward—and Ledger is the only player in this market with genuine brand recognition. According to BSCN, it commands 50–70% market share. Ledger claims to safeguard $10 billion in Bitcoin—roughly 5% of Bitcoin’s total market capitalization.
Timing matters too.
In 2025, crypto firms raised $3.4 billion via IPOs. Circle and Bullish each secured over $1 billion. BitGo recently became the first crypto firm to go public in 2026. Kraken is waiting in line with a $20 billion valuation.
This is an exit feast—and Ledger doesn’t want to miss its seat at the table.
Founders want liquidity. VCs need exits. And amid surging Bitcoin prices, public markets are eager to buy any stock bearing the “crypto” label.
According to the Market Growth Report, the global cryptocurrency hardware wallet market stood at $914 million in 2026 and is projected to reach approximately $12.7 billion by 2035—a compound annual growth rate of 33.7%. If adoption accelerates—as suggested by Bitcoin ETFs and growing institutional interest—Ledger stands well-positioned to capture this expansion.
And the $4 billion valuation reflects the “crypto custody infrastructure” narrative. Investors aren’t buying a hardware company—they’re buying the industry’s sole brand-recognized “digital vault.”
In other words, valuation is narrative-driven—not fundamentals-driven.
Truth Lies Beyond the Candlestick Charts
Of course, narratives can shift overnight.
How have those crypto companies that went public in 2025 performed over the past six months?
Circle: Down from a high of $298 to $69.
Bullish: Down from $118 to $34.
BitGo surged 25% on its first trading day—then fully reversed those gains within three days.
That’s the fate of crypto stocks: They move with Bitcoin—not with fundamentals.
Dr. Marcin Kazmierczak, Co-Founder and COO of modular oracle Redstone, noted in an interview that despite ongoing market uncertainty, the regulatory environment remains favorable for Ledger.
He added that Ledger’s revenue remains tied to consumer hardware cycles—and warned, “Another prolonged downturn would certainly impact this, as we saw in 2022.” Yet he also pointed out that the IPO may benefit from “an institutional cycle stronger than pure retail enthusiasm.”
Survival of the Fittest
Ledger’s IPO story is a mirror held up to the crypto industry.
A company whose core selling point is “security” faces its greatest risk exposure precisely from security failures.
A product promising users “full control of their private keys” introduced a service entrusting key shards to third parties.
A team whose co-founder lost a finger is preparing to take its company public—into a far more transparent, highly scrutinized capital market.
Is there contradiction here?
Of course.
But the survival rule in crypto has never been eliminating contradictions—it’s learning to live with them.
The 2020 data breach didn’t kill Ledger. Neither did the 2023 supply-chain attack, nor the Recover controversy, nor the kidnapping of its co-founder.
It not only survived—it’s going public.
Perhaps that’s crypto’s deepest metaphor:
In a world where even founders’ fingers aren’t safe, nothing is truly secure.
Yet money always finds its way.
And the companies still standing amid the rubble often emerge as kings of the next cycle.
Whether Ledger is among them—time will tell.
Or perhaps, the next breach will.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
深潮TechFlow
