Ledger to Assist Micro Strategy in Obtaining Treasury of $400 Million BTC

One of the most popular names in the world of consumer hardware wallets is none other than Ledger. However, a number of enterprises switched to the Ledger Vault from last year onwards. These claims were made by Ledger’s Vice President of Product, Jean-Michel Pailhon. The Ledger Vault is aimed at providing custody solutions to its numerous enterprise clients. As a matter of fact, the Ledger team is extremely confident about their offerings, so much so that they are also trying to convince MicroStrategy that it is a better option than the current wallet in their use. 

A business intelligence firm, MicroStrategy made waves in the cryptocurrency market in August 2020 because it decided to convert a large amount of its capital into Bitcoin (BTC). In recent news, payment processor Square also followed in the company’s footsteps and ended up acquiring Bitcoin worth $50 million. The payment processor has also developed an open-source framework in house for keeping its different assets secure, which has been given the name of SubZero. A few prominent similarities were highlighted by Pailhon, such as the fact that they both manage digital assets by using Hardware Security Modules, or HSMs. 

As HSMs are generally regarded as invulnerable, they have existed for decades and are being used widely. Therefore, it is not surprising to discover that HSMs are often used for securing critical data. While Pailhon did praise SuZero and referred to it as a great framework, he also said that those using it have to be knowledgeable about how to manage and deploy HSMs. Therefore, according to Pailhon, this task is best suited for technology companies, such as Square. In contrast, Ledger takes the responsibility of dealing with the more technical aspects on behalf of its clients. In this way, its clients only have to worry about using the given solution instead of trying to figure out how it works. 

As far as how the onboarding process would function, Pailhon said that the first step is to decide how many people have to be involved in the transaction authorization process. He stated that in most cases, it is the norm to have two to three signatures, which include those of the CEO, the CFO, and the General Counsel. He said that these are private keys and they will then be stored on an HSM. However, he did say that it was possible that the segments of these private keys would be kept separately in several physical vaults. 

If a transaction needs to be performed by an officer of the company, they will first need to log into the Ledger Vault and then enter the desired transaction. Afterward, a notification will be sent to all signatories. For the transaction to be approved, these signatories would have to log in, and then their respective computers would have to be connected to the Ledger Blue hard wallet. Next, they would have to enter their unique pins for Ledger Blue for adding their signature to the transaction. It is possible for a signatory to abort the transaction altogether.