Now cryptosecurity giant Ledger is making a massive push on Wall Street.
The firm is now aggressively targeting institutional investors, and Ledger just opened a New York office and appointed former Circle executive John Andrews as CFO.
The move comes as Ledger explores a highly anticipated US IPO that could potentially value the company at over $4 billion.
Now this does come at a time when demand for secure, enterprise grade.
Infrastructure is skyrocketing.
Joining me live here at DAS is Sebastien Badault, VP of Enterprise at Ledger.
Sebastian, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
Well, first and foremost, there have been a lot of announcements coming out of Ledger, and when we're at a summit like this, we do expect to hear from a lot of organizations.
So first and foremost, tell me about the latest and greatest.
I mean, the latest and greatest is yesterday we opened our office.
New York, I think it's a really important move for us.
We've been in the US, we've had teams here for a while, but having actually be home for this team and also to be just closer to everything that's happening in the city has been really important.
We've seen a massive shift over the past 12 to 18 months coming from traditional finance, coming from banks, institutions, and a lot of them are here.
So being in the center of where everything happens is really important for us.
So we At an event last night to open our space to our partners, potential customers, existing customers, and our teams, and it was lovely to, you know, start off that opening and with great things to come and great things to build in the future.
Yes, and Seb, speaking of the future, of course there are expectations that you may go public as a company.
So tell us a little bit about Why you decided to open a New York office, especially given the regulatory landscape here in the US right now?
Well, I think that's one of the big reasons, right?
The regulatory landscape is what has created that shift.
It started with ETFs a couple of years ago, BlackRock, etc.
Genius Act, you know, last year, hopefully clarity this year.
And as a result, what we've been seeing is, you know, institutions that had, and that's been my, my big takeaway is that You know, I've been working in digital in the digital space for many years, and 20 years ago when you would go see companies and talk to them about digital, they had no clue Fortune 500 or the internet, or was it something that they wanted to do.
But now when you go and see banks and financial institutions, they all know about blockchain and crypto, and they've been working towards building infrastructures.
They were just waiting for the green light from the regulator.
They Have a full green light.
They haven't, you know, I guess it's close, close enough to green, but everyone, I don't think there is, there's a bank that doesn't have either a tokenization, a stablecoin, a custody project in place or a trading platform that they want to build for their customers.
And the reality is that they want to build on the safest possible infrastructure.
And since we've built the gold standard.
For security and digital assets, we really have an amazing moment to, you know, be able to help them secure all their projects.
Yeah.
And speaking of which, SEC Chair Paul Atkins is here at the event as well, so we will be hearing from him later this morning.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you work as VP of enterprise, so tell us what you're focused on right now.
Why?
I think that the main focus is, we have two focuses, right?
The first one is on the product side and innovation, making sure that we build what our customers want.
I think again we have the gold, we've built the gold standard and we've built it over the past 7 or 8 years, and now when you take it to market and you take it in front of your customers, you need to adapt it to customize it.
So really having the best of. product for our customers is the first thing and then working hand in hand with them to be able to integrate, to be able to go into their tech stack.
Everyone's got a different tech stack, so we have to be able to adapt to that.
So it's really my, my, my, my, my work and my team's work is really to spend as much time as possible with all these customers to try to help them navigate a new space because it's a New space for them, uh, using, you know, what they've built in the past and and I love this idea that, you know, bringing blockchain technology into try to fight, this idea of like newfi or nextfi, whatever you want to call it, uh, but that's where magic happens when you bring innovation and technology, you know, on the base on a very strong base which is the financial ecosystem which lives here in New York.
Yeah, and speaking of which, that is a new term that I haven't heard, adding the phi at the end, but I'm sure that will be something that we continue to hear.
So finally, we all know that institutional competition is heating up in this space.
So tell us about the competitive advantage that ledger brings.
I think it's all, I think, so this is about this space, but it's also the next space, right?
So what's happening right now obviously is AI and agentic commerce that's really coming into space.
We have agents now who are going to have access to value and be able to spend money online, etc.
And so what we really believe is that and our CEO Pascal Gauthier wrote a really great piece called The Revenge of the Adom last week, which we published last week.
If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do it, to do so.
And the idea is that in this world of AI, in this world of full digital, the mode is hardware, right?
You need a kill switch to be able to prove that you're human if you're a human being, but also to be able to say, I approve this transaction, and that will Only have like software based solutions will not allow you to do that.
Only hardware is going to be able to do that.
So the atom is getting revenge, and we're lucky enough to have been building a hardware company for the past 11 years.
So it's really our moment to be able to like do that.
So that's that, that's what I see.
I see that importance of the atom, the importance of physical device to really create a bone in security.
Yeah, and in a nutshell, for those of our viewers who have not read that.
What would you say is the key takeaway from that report?
I mean, it's really this idea that in order to fully secure a transaction, you cannot do it with your phone.
A phone is not secure.
Our team, our technical team, our hackers' team like white hat, white, white, white hat hackers, found an Android phone, over a billion Android phones, a critical problem, a critical issue which allows you to hack these phones in less than 60 seconds.
There's a billion phones out there, so there's no way that you can transact in value because if your phone has value in it, any coins, etc. at any moment you could get hacked.
So the idea to have a separate piece of hardware that has a secure screen, a secure element, which is what Ledger has built, the only ones who have built that technology is the way to really secure value.
So that's the idea.
Well, Seb, it was great talking to you.
Thank you so much for joining us as we kick off Digital Asset Summit 2026 in New York City.
Thank you.
Thank you.
