Ledger steps off a ledge. Ripple makes waves. Gary Vee widens his NFT-centered stance to encompass A.I. in a broader business play, and Adidas presses forward, building upon its solid Web3 foundation. And no, this introduction was not written by ChatGPT.
Ledger, a leading maker of cryptocurrency hardware wallets (not to be confused with the LedgerX exchange), burned a ton of customer and market trust this week when it announced its “key recovery service”—the very description of which being sufficient enough to ignite a firestorm.
Ledger Recover allows Ledger users to regain access to their wallets by storing their ostensibly private seed phrase in three separately-controlled pieces. Since the company had built its reputation on the “not your keys, not your crypto” ideal, the fact that seed phrases could even leave their devices was described as a backdoor.
A Ledger co-founder—no longer associated with the company—decried “so much anger, so much hate” over the move. Yet Ledger itself is struggling to explain exactly how Ledger Recover is safe. He belatedly amended the statement, “A firmware update cannot extract the private keys from the Secure Element,” adding, “as long as you are trusting Ledger.”
The FUD flames were so frantically fanned that competitors fired off their own flares, announcing discounts on their hardware wallet alternatives.
🪙 Coin of the moment
It was a good week for crypto firm Ripple, making it a good week for its native coin, XRP, which is up 10% for the week.
Ripple won a key court battle in its fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the SEC’s attempt to seal material related to a speech given by a former commissioner about how crypto should be classified. That same day, the company acquired Swiss digital asset firm Metaco.
Sensing both pitfalls and potential in the global interest in Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Ripple then announced its solution, which it claims “will help enable instant settlement of both domestic and cross-border payments, reduce risk, and improve the user experience of quickly sending and receiving digital currency on either side of a transaction.”
XRP itself, meanwhile, got another vote of confidence when the ‘Blights Wrath’ game launched on its network, capitalizing on the Ripple payment service and facilitating play-to-earn quests and in-game NFT purchases.
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For a while there, Adidas Web3 lead Erika Wykes-Sneyd worried her push to get the 74-year-old brand working with Web3 partners might not work out. “Like signing a deal with the Bored Ape Yacht Club when Gargamel and Gordon were not doxxed individuals—that got me nervous,” she told Stacy Elliott and Andrew Hayward. “Approving the first ever ETH purchase on a public company. Like DAX organizations are pretty risk averse. I was like, definitely could get fired for this.”
During VeeCon 2023, the entrepreneur spoke with Decrypt’s Andrew Hayward about the rise of AI tools, what excites him about the technology, and what kind of impact he thinks it will have on creators and business.
