Ledger Crypto Hardware Wallet Maker Plans For 100 Token Support by 2020

Ledger, the important wallet manufacturer based in France is preparing a huge plan for the future. The main intention is to meet the demand that the market has now, particularly from institutional investors.

According to the company, they will be adding support to new cryptocurrency assets the first Tuesday of each month. This will start in August and the goal is to have more than 100 different coins supported by the end of 2019.

Currently, Ledger is able to handle two dozen tokens and during this week they will be adding support to Tron (TRX) and Zcoin (XZC).

Institutional investors are searching ways to invest in other virtual currencies and not just the most important in the market, like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin. This shows that the crypto industry is growing at very fast rates with more coins and assets offered to wealthy investors and players.

Ledger is mostly known for the cryptocurrency wallet solutions and hardware provided, but the company is also offering custody services to hedge funds and other bigger players.

The CEO Eric Larcheveque explained that the newer business lines are related to custody services for other players. The same is doing BitGo, who recently decided to add support for 57 ethereum-based assets to the custody services for institutions.

The cryptocurrency market has been growing in the last years, and during 2018, even when the prices did not grow up, the interest of institutional investors for crypto-related solutions has been increasing over time.

“If we want to sign those [institutional] customers, we don’t have a choice,” explained Larcheveque. “We have to support the top 100 cryptos, minimum. This will allow hundreds of hedge funds to deploy their capital into crypto, and enable all these other financial institutions to move billions into crypto.”

Furthermore, Ledger president Pascal Gauthier explained that it is very important for the crypto market to bring traditional players into the cryptocurrency world.

An Integral Improvement

The company is trying to bring new players to the ecosystem, but at the same time it is trying to improve and enhance the hardware wallet that it offers to retail investors.

About it Larcheveque commented:

“I would say that the major drive for crypto integration, in the end, comes from the needs of our enterprise customers. At the same time, it profits our hardware wallet users. It’s a virtuous circle.”

During this week, the start-up unveiled a new upgraded version of the application used by the hardware wallet. The last application included several applications in just one, but the new Ledger Live will automatically push updates to all parts of the application. In this way it will be possible to offer and support new tokens in a faster way.

It is very easy now, to add several cryptos, something that would help the company reach the goal proposed.

Ledger has sold over one million unites in the last months, and the App usage is now growing faster than the demand for new hardware wallets. The app can be used without the wallet, and frew from 100,000 monthly users in November 2017 to 500,000 monthly users now.

This is a very important number considering that cryptocurrencies are in a bear market and the interest for BTC and other coins is not the same as some months ago. In the future, with a bullish market, this number could be even bigger.

Ledger allows external communities to build support features for their favourite virtual currencies.

“Then we can publish them [support features] after review,” said Larcheveque. “Thanks to the community work by all these developers, we can scale much faster than adding new cryptos.”

Tron’s head of engineering, Tian Han, explained that the support added by leger was created in part by a submission made by a user. But he also stated that the organization provided financial assistance.

Tradeoffs

The philosophy embraced by the crypto community ‘you are your own bank’ seems difficult to embrace it by offering custodial solutions to Wall Street investors.

But Ledger is prepared for that and has two different business lines that target institutional investors. For example, the company has a series of partnerships with organizations including Nomura Bank in Japan. The other solution is known as Vault, an enterprise-grade custody solution for institutions including hedge funds.

Gauthier said about these solutions:

“They are being their own bank just like with the Nano S [Ledger’s hardware wallet] you are being your own bank as an individual. The different manaes that are signing off on the transactions will all have a device.”

But this is a strange position taken because institutions do not want to manage their own private keys. Some other companies that offer similar services have different proposals for institutional investors, where the client, a partner and a third party have keys.

The market for institutional investors is opening and the infrastructure is expanding. In the future, the price of the most important virtual currencies could start growing with the money that wealthy investors start placing in the market.