Ledger's CEO Says Everybody Gets Hacked!

Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier went on Bloomberg Crypto on November 10 and said that everybody will be hacked at some point. He added that the same goes for Ledger, and that the threat picture gets worse every year.

Fair enough as a statement of fact. Slightly less great coming from the guy whose company sells a device built to make you feel the opposite. Crypto X noticed within hours.

The Question Behind The Answer

Hosts Isabelle Lee and Tim Stenovec asked how Ledger can reassure customers after October. They had a point. On October 9, users who bought Ledgers through CryptoBilis, an authorized reseller covering Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, started reporting drained wallets. Ledger Support told buyers from that reseller not to set up their devices. A day later it confirmed that at least one affected unit contained an unauthorized hardware implant.

The implant, per Ledger, copied recovery phrases and sent them out over a cellular connection. The Secure Element itself was not compromised. So the chip did its job. Everything around it didn't.

Loss estimates vary. Bitquery counted roughly $102 million across 324 wallets in its October 12 update, while other trackers landed between $72 million and $93 million. Gauthier used about $90 million on Bloomberg. Tether froze around $10 million in USDT, and some of the stolen ETH went through Tornado Cash.

The 0.01% Defense

Gauthier's pitch was a ratio. $90 million, he argued, is about 0.01% of what Ledger protects, and far below the roughly $6 billion lost in the Binance breach. BTC-ECHO puts that October 29 hack at $6.4 billion and says the FBI attributes it to North Korean attackers. Other outlets say $6.3 billion. Either way, it is not a small number.

He also said centralized platforms are the bigger target because they pile so much crypto in one place, naming FTX and Bybit. Per Wu Blockchain's summary, he added that the market still needs banks and Binance. On the wider picture, he put crypto theft at about $9 billion last year and roughly $12 billion so far in 2026, with AI-assisted attacks and eventually quantum computing making things harder.

One caveat on the math. At face value, 0.01% implies Ledger secures around $900 billion, and that denominator is Ledger's own estimate. Nobody has independently checked it.

The Timeline

BeInCrypto's post put the headline in front of a lot of eyes, and the replies were not kind. One user, 0xdxve, asked why anyone should bother storing coins on a Ledger if everyone gets hacked anyway. Bert called it a weird thing for a hardware wallet CEO to say. Jeremy said he would take a big short on Ledger if it were public. StarPlatinum pointed out that Ledger's whole business is a device designed to prevent hacks.

I get the anger. I also think a lot of it misses what actually happened. This was not a failure of the secure chip. It was a supply chain failure upstream of the customer, which is the kind of process attack Gauthier said back in 2019 accounts for most crypto hacks, according to an old Breaker interview. He was consistent. He just picked a rough week to be consistent.

What Ledger Didn't Catch In Time

The harder question is speed. Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès posted photos of a spy implant in a Nano X on September 16, weeks before Ledger's first public warning. He and Gauthier later traded public barbs over it, per BTC-ECHO.

Then it spread. A German customer who bought a Nano X at MediaMarkt reported an implant too, and another buyer, Johannes, said a second unit from a different store in the chain had one. MediaMarktSaturn halted Ledger sales across 11 countries on October 13. Ledger says no losses have been confirmed outside Southeast Asia, and The Block reported that no funds were lost in the German case. Trezor later said it had found a tampered device that came from the same CryptoBilis reseller, according to 24/7 Wall St.

What Ledger Is Selling Next

Gauthier spent a good part of the interview on Ledger Atom, a secure phone with a trusted screen. He said the company launched it while under attack. Shipments are scheduled for July 2027, according to Incrypted's write-up. Ledger has not said when MediaMarkt Saturn sales will resume.