Former Apple Exec Tony Fadell Debuts Offline Crypto Wallet

Former Apple executive Tony Fadell has debuted a wallet used to store cryptocurrency offline.

Fadell, who spent nearly a decade at Apple and helped usher in the iPod and iPhone, has joined forces with French technology company Ledger to launch the wallet, Reuters reported Tuesday (Dec. 6).

The report said Ledger’s earlier wallets were shaped like USB memory sticks. Fadell’s design, dubbed the “Ledger Stax,” will go on sale next year. It’s a device the size of a credit card that features a curved spine and an electronic-ink display.

“All of the secure hardware up to this point was like all the MP3 players before the iPod, and it was time for an iPod,” Ian Rogers, Ledger’s chief experience officer, said.

The report noted that the recent collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, which wiped out more than $1 billion in customer funds, has prompted a rise in demand for offline “self-custody” services like Ledger provides.

As PYMNTS wrote Tuesday, the crypto crisis “can be traced, in part, to custody.”

In the wake of FTX’s implosion, trust has become a big issue, as putting custody of consumers’ digital holdings on exchanges — which are at best lightly regulated — has been a hurdle to the mainstream embrace of crypto.

FTX is only the latest in a string of examples of the issues at play here, where following the money can be difficult, “and where consumers have found out just how vulnerable they’ve been to losses only after the fact,” we wrote. When crypto exchanges fail, users can lose some or all of the money that’s been held on that exchange.

“While conventional wisdom holds that self-custody is a safer way to store crypto, it demands that one not lose private keys, else they risk losing access to their cryptos (and the money tied to them) forever,” PYMNTS wrote.

Exchanges, meanwhile, are a work in progress. One of the biggest issues coming out of the FTX crisis is how customer assets were — or weren’t — kept in segregated accounts, thus making it hard to recover those funds.

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