Fear is a bad advisor, that’s certainly true for traders, but not when it comes to securing your cryptocurrency. This year has been plagued by poorly written decentralized protocols, central exchanges that don’t have their act together and scams. Not surprisingly, manufacturers of hardware wallets are talking about their sales figures.
What is a hardware wallet?
A hardware wallet is a physical device that allows you to securely manage your cryptocurrencies. A hardware wallet allows you to receive, send and manage cryptocurrencies. It is important to note that these physical devices do not literally store crypto, but keep access to your crypto safe and offline. This way, no hacker can access your bitcoin without being in possession of your hardware wallet and its PIN.
There are several manufacturers of hardware wallets, for example the popular Nano series made by Ledger of France and the Trezor Series by Czech company SatoshiLabs and CoolWallet.
This bear market is different
Pascal Gauthier, CEO of hardware wallet crypto company Ledger, says to Cointelegraph that the company’s revenue fell by about 90% during the crypto winter of 2018, but that is not the case this year:
“Every quarter we have as much revenue as all of 2020, which was a very good year for Ledger. Right now we’re still going up year on year, 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.”
Fear is a good advisor
By centralized value propositions, Gauthier is referring to third parties such as exchanges that hold coins. For example, Ledger sold most of its wallets after U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase shared their quarterly results, which were far from rosy.
This suggests that users fear bankruptcy and prefer to withdraw their coins from Coinbase to manage them themselves with a hardware wallet.
This is a good development anyway, because the whole idea of crypto is to be in charge of your own coins, not to hand it over to a third party.
“After we published this report, we made $2 million a day, but it was just a high point because nothing bad happened to Coinbase. People just realized that their crypto was not safe,”.
That fear was fueled by Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, when he tweeted the following.
Sales figures rise where others seemingly fail
Gauthier also observed this behavior when lending protocol Celsius froze recordings and users could not access their coins. Even when there were (as yet false) rumors circulating that BlockFi would do the same, Ledger saw growth in their sales numbers.
“People rushed to our products to move money to a safe place. We now see that sales have been increasing for six weeks in a row,”.
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