Blockchain analysis firm Glassnode recently characterized the 2022 bear market as the worst on record. This seems to be the case due to events such as the war in Ukraine and rising inflation, coupled with serious problems among centralized crypto exchanges.
Yet, the bear market hasn’t negatively impacted all players in the crypto ecosystem. Hardware wallet providers seem to be benefiting from the massive amount of crypto withdrawals from centralized exchanges.
Pascal Gauthier, CEO of hardware wallet crypto firm Ledger, told Cointelegraph that the company’s revenue dropped about 90% during the 2018 crypto winter, but this hasn’t been the case this year. He said:
“Every quarter we are doing as much revenue as the whole of 2020, which was a very good year for Ledger. Right now year-on-year we are still up, which tells us that this bear market is different. It’s not a real bear market, but rather a bear market for centralized value propositions.”
To put this in perspective, Gauthier shared that the company shipped the most units of Ledger hardware wallets to date following Coinbase’s declaration of losses, which further suggested that users are not protected in the case of bankruptcy. “We did $2 million a day in revenue following the release of this report, but it was just a peak because nothing bad actually happened to Coinbase. People just realized that their crypto wasn’t safe,” he said.
Gauthier elaborated that once Celsius froze users’ funds and rumors began circulating that BlockFi may do the same, Ledger, yet again, saw a major boost in business. “People were rushing to our products to move funds to somewhere secure. We have now been seeing about six-times an increase in revenue week-on-week,” said Gauthier. Ariel Wengroff, head of global communications and marketing at Ledger, further told Cointelegraph that the company recently formed a partnership with Best Buy, allowing consumers to buy Ledger products directly in-store, which has also increased sales. “We are launching in 256 more stores this July,” she said.
Ledger isn’t the only hardware wallet provider witnessing revenue gains in this bear market. Josef Tětek, Bitcoin (BTC) analyst at Trezor, told Cointelegraph that the firm has also seen a significant surge of interest in Trezor devices. “People are finding out that keeping their coins on exchanges and with custodians can be very risky, so they are naturally looking for self-custody options,” he…
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