“One million dollars straight in crypto, in cold storage,” hedge fund chief Bobby Axelrod on HBO’s Billions in May, giving a USB stick to his steadfast lieutenant. Instead of PDFs, the stick contained the way to a Bitcoin wallet, an untraceable 21st-century result for administrations rendered. This isn’t some made-up TV tech either. The stick is known as a Ledger Nano S, and it’s a genuine item from a French startup that could before long be Europe’s first crypto unicorn.

“I guess it was a bit of a stretch,” concedes Pascal Gauthier, the leader of Ledger, alluding to Billions. He says his innovation wasn’t exactly expected to be utilized as a part of such a way. Rather, Gauthier put resources into and later joined Ledger to illuminate the imperfect characteristic at the core of the blockchain arrangement that Bitcoin keeps running on.

“Blockchain itself is secure, but signing on the blockchain is a flaw,” says Gauthier.

Every Bitcoin client has a private key which gives him or her entrance to their crypto fortune. “Signing” is the way toward utilizing that key to get to your wallet and send Bitcoin to another wallet. The issue is that these keys are essentially strings of 256 characters that are held outside the blockchain system and are at a gigantically high danger of being stolen—somebody could just duplicate your key and have instant access to your Bitcoin.

“If you lose the [private key], there’s no bank looking after your assets or any way to recover them,” he explains.

In the beginning of Bitcoin, individuals would ordinarily keep their private key put away on their PC. Be that as it may, as the estimation of the Bitcoin diaspora took off, the danger of PCs being hacked and keys being stolen developed.

In 2014, Gauthier had ventured down as COO of Criteo, the advertisement tech organization that had recorded on NASDAQ at a valuation of $1.7 billion, when he wound up attracted to the private key test of cryptocurrencies.

The famous system for some individuals at the time was just to depend their Bitcoin fortunes to outsiders, however these outsiders rapidly ended up gigantic targets themselves, coming full circle in the Mt Gox hack of 2014 when a few digital assaults prompted the loss of $450 million in Bitcoin.

“I thought ‘wow, there is a huge problem here.’”

Ledger’s answer was to put private keys, Bitcoin’s single point of weakness, in what’s known as “cold storage”— physically disengaging them from the web and through a different gadget the extent of a USB stick.

It was definitely not an extraordinary thought, there are many equipment wallets accessible with names like Trezor and Secalot, yet Ledger’s convenience and security with gadgets like the Ledger Nano S rapidly made it among the top of the line.

Gauthier says Ledger sold over a million gadgets a year ago over 165 nations, producing deals in abundance of €45 million ($52.9 million) and driving the organization into benefit, with Ebitda of €25 million ($29.4 million).

His vision of comprehending the Bitcoin’s greatest imperfection has likewise been upheld by a portion of Europe’s greatest speculators. In January, Draper Esprit drove on Ledger’s $75 million Series B subsidizing round giving the organization a valuation answered to be $300 million. Be that as it may, today Gauthier says pitching to buyers is just the begin.

The organization is on track for another gainful year and, with investments directors queueing outside Gauthier’s office, Ledger could rapidly be going from TV’s Billions to a billion-dollar business of its own.

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