Ledger Aims To Help MicroStrategy In Securing Treasury of $400 Million BTC

Ledger is most well known for its consumer-facing hardware wallets. However, since last year, an array of enterprises have started to opt to use Ledger Vault. These claims come by way of Jean-Michel Pailhon, the Vice President of Product at Ledger. Ledger Vault prioritizes the provision of custody solutions to its various enterprise clients.

The Ledger team is so confident in this, that they’re trying to convince Microstrategy that it’s better than the current wallet they’re using.

Trying To Woo Microstrategy

MicroStrategy stands as a business intelligence firm, and made waves in August of 2020 in the crypto space thanks to it opting to convert a large segment of its treasury into Bitcoin (BTC). In a more recent move, Square, having recently acquired around $50 million in Bitcoin, had also developed an in-house open-source framework to secure its various assets, going by the name of SubZero.

Pailhon highlighted a few key similarities, such as how they both leverage Hardware Security Modules, or HSMs, in order to manage digital assets. HSMs have been around for decades and are widely used, due to it being considered generally invulnerable. As such, HSMs are often leveraged to secure critical data.

Pailhon was quick to praise SubZero as a great framework, but claimed that it needs the parties using it to be knowledgeable in the deployment and management of HSMs. As such, Pailhon considers it best suited for tech companies like Square.

A More “Plug And Play” Style Of Hard Wallet

Ledger, by contrast, manages the more technical aspects for their clients, allowing the clients to only worry about using the solution and not needing to know how it works.

In regard to how this onboarding process would work, Pailhon told that the first step of the matter is concluding how many individuals need to be involved with transaction authorization. Typically, Pailhon stated that two to three signatures are the norm, including maybe the CFO, the CEO, and General Counsel holding a signature each.

All of these private keys, he said, would subsequently be stored on an HSM. Pailhon highlighted that segments of these private keys might be stored separately in a number of physical vaults, as well.

The Nitty Gritty

Should an officer of the company seek to enact a transaction, he first needs to log into Ledger Vault, then put in the desired transaction. Afterward, all signatories needed will get a notification. In order to have it approved, these signatories are mandated to log in and connect their Ledger Blue hard wallet to their respective computers.

Afterward, they need to input their unique Ledger Blue pins in order to give the transaction their signature. One final layer of protection is included: One of the signatories can opt to abort the transaction altogether, though that’s assuming the minimum signatures needed to transact haven’t come up yet.