Left hand to right hand? Unpacking the financial leverage loop behind the AI boom and Wall Street’s ultimate high-stakes bet

Source: ShenChao TechFlow

In the early hours of January 21, 2025, in the small town of Méreau in central France.

David Balland was dragged out of his home in the middle of the night. He is a co-founder of Ledger, the cryptocurrency hardware wallet company that claims to safeguard more than $100 billion worth of Bitcoin for users worldwide.

According to France’s Le Monde, when elite GIGN special forces broke in 48 hours later, Balland was missing a finger.

The kidnappers sent a video of the severed finger to Ledger’s other co-founder, Éric Larchevêque, along with a message: payment in cryptocurrency only. No police. No delays. Or else.

One year later, Ledger announced plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation exceeding $4 billion. Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, Barclays—some of Wall Street’s loudest names—are all backing the deal.

This is a business built on “security.”

Ironic?

The leaked addresses

Let’s rewind to 2020.

That summer, a misconfigured API endpoint allowed attackers easy access to Ledger’s e-commerce database. More than one million email addresses were leaked. Worse still, the names, phone numbers, and home addresses of 272,000 customers were exposed.

Six months later, the dataset appeared on the hacker forum RaidForums and was sold for a negligible price, freely accessible to anyone.

You can imagine what followed.

Phishing emails flooded in, luring Ledger users to malicious links in an attempt to steal their private keys. Some users received emails that included their full names and home addresses, threatening physical visits to steal their crypto unless a ransom was paid.

Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier later stated that the company would not compensate customers whose personal data had been leaked on hacker sites—including those whose home addresses were exposed.

The incident cost Ledger dearly. But the real price has been paid by users who, to this day, continue to live in fear.

So—did Ledger learn its lesson?

Same mistake, three times

On December 14, 2023, Ledger was hit again.

This time, the path was almost absurd: a former Ledger employee fell victim to a phishing attack, giving attackers access to his NPMJS account.

No one explained how long he had left the company. No one explained why a former employee still had access to critical systems.

Malicious code was injected into Ledger Connect Kit, a core library relied upon by countless DeFi applications. SushiSwap, Zapper, Phantom, Balancer—the front end of the DeFi ecosystem instantly turned into phishing pages.

Ledger fixed the issue within 40 minutes. But $600,000 was already gone.

CEO Pascal Gauthier later described it as “an unfortunate isolated incident.”

Isolated?

Just two weeks before announcing its IPO plan, on January 5, 2026, Ledger disclosed yet another breach—this time involving its third-party payment processor Global-e. Customer names and contact details were leaked once again.

Six years. Three major breaches.

Each time, an “isolated incident.” Each time, a “third-party issue.” And each time, the users bore the consequences.

If a traditional financial institution suffered three major security incidents in six years, regulators would have pulled its license long ago. In crypto, it can go public—and triple its valuation.

Recover: a public betrayal

If data breaches can be blamed on accidents or negligence, Ledger Recover was a deliberate self-detonation.

In May 2023, Ledger launched a new service priced at $9.99 per month. Users could split and encrypt their recovery phrase and entrust the shards to three companies: Ledger, Coincover, and EscrowTech. Lose your recovery phrase? Show your ID and get it back.

For everyday users worried about losing their seed phrase, it sounded reassuring.

But there was a fundamental problem: the entire premise of hardware wallets is that “the private key never leaves the device.”

Former Ledger CEO Larchevêque later admitted on Reddit that if users enabled Recover, governments could legally compel the three companies to hand over the key shards and access user funds.

The community exploded. Photos of users burning their Ledger devices circulated on Twitter.

Polygon’s Chief Information Security Officer Mudit Gupta tweeted: “Anything protected by ‘identity verification’ is inherently insecure, because identities are easy to fake.”

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao also questioned whether this meant cold wallet seed phrases could be separated from the device, calling it fundamentally opposed to crypto’s core principles.

Ledger’s response was blunt: “Most crypto users today still rely on exchanges or software wallets with limited security. For many people, managing a 24-word recovery phrase is itself an insurmountable barrier. Paper backups are becoming obsolete.”

The logic isn’t wrong. But when a company’s growth strategy requires diluting its core value proposition, things get complicated.

Ledger’s early users were geeks. Geeks argue. Geeks write long Reddit posts criticizing you. But geeks already bought their wallets—and they don’t drive growth.

Growth comes from newcomers. Newcomers hate friction. Newcomers will gladly pay $9.99 for peace of mind. They don’t care about “private keys never leaving the device.”

This isn’t a trade-off between security and convenience.

It’s a public betrayal of core users—cashing in their trust for access to a larger market.

The wrench attack

Let’s return to David Balland’s missing finger.

Crypto has a term: the “wrench attack.” No matter how strong the cryptography or how decentralized the protocol, nothing stops someone holding a wrench and demanding your private key.

It sounds like dark humor—a joke programmers make while sketching threat models on a whiteboard.

But when it actually happens, it isn’t funny at all.

In December 2024, the wife of Belgian crypto influencer Stéphane Winkel was kidnapped. In May 2025, the father of another crypto millionaire lost a finger. Balland’s case is part of a broader trend.

A French internal security expert said in an interview: “The methods are strikingly similar. Whether it’s the same group remains under investigation, but one thing is clear—the industry has become a hunting ground for professional kidnappers.”

The question is: where does the hit list come from?

Those 272,000 home addresses from 2020 are still circulating on the dark web. This wasn’t just a data leak—it was a directory labeled “this person owns crypto,” with asset size roughly inferable from the Ledger model purchased. Buyers of the most expensive models likely held the most crypto.

In a sense, Balland’s fate was seeded by Ledger itself.

That may sound harsh—Ledger didn’t hand data to kidnappers. But when a company that sells “security” can’t even protect customer home addresses, it’s hard to claim zero responsibility.

The logic of $4 billion

After all this negativity, why is Wall Street still backing Ledger?

One word: FTX.

In November 2022, FTX collapsed. A $32 billion valuation vanished overnight. Hundreds of thousands of users had their assets frozen, many never to be recovered.

“Not your keys, not your coins” suddenly became a brutal lesson.

Hardware wallet demand exploded—and Ledger was the only player with real brand recognition. According to BSCN, it controls 50–70% of the market. Ledger claims to safeguard $100 billion in Bitcoin—around 5% of total global supply.

Timing matters too.

In 2025, crypto companies raised $3.4 billion via IPOs. Circle and Bullish each raised over $1 billion. BitGo became the first crypto company to list in 2026. Kraken is reportedly lining up at a $20 billion valuation.

It’s an exit feast. Ledger doesn’t want to miss the table.

Founders want liquidity. VCs want out. And secondary markets—fueled by a Bitcoin frenzy—are willing to buy anything labeled “crypto.”

According to Market Growth Report, the global crypto hardware wallet market was valued at $914 million in 2026 and is projected to reach $12.7 billion by 2035, with a CAGR of 33.7%. If adoption accelerates—as Bitcoin ETFs and institutional interest suggest—Ledger is well positioned to capture the upside.

A $4 billion valuation isn’t about hardware. It’s about the narrative of “crypto custody infrastructure.” Investors aren’t buying a device maker—they’re buying the industry’s only recognizable “digital vault.”

In other words, it’s narrative pricing, not business pricing.

The truth beyond the candlesticks

Narratives, of course, can change overnight.

Look at crypto stocks that listed in 2025. How have they performed?

Circle: down from $298 to $69.

Bullish: from $118 to $34.

BitGo: up 25% on day one, gains erased within three days.

That’s the fate of crypto equities: correlated with Bitcoin, disconnected from fundamentals.

Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder and COO of modular oracle Redstone, said in an interview that despite ongoing uncertainty, the regulatory environment remains favorable for Ledger.

He cautioned that Ledger’s revenue is still tied to consumer hardware cycles—“another prolonged downturn would absolutely hurt, as we saw in 2022”—but noted that an IPO could benefit from “an institutional cycle stronger than pure retail enthusiasm.”

Survival of the adaptable

Ledger’s IPO story is a mirror of the crypto industry.

A company selling “security,” whose greatest historical risks came from security failures.

A product promising full user control over private keys, now offering third-party key custody.

A team whose co-founder lost a finger, preparing to step into the most public capital market of all.

Contradictions? Absolutely.

But crypto has never been about resolving contradictions. It’s about surviving with them.

The 2020 data breach didn’t kill Ledger. Neither did the 2023 supply-chain attack. Nor the Recover backlash. Nor a co-founder’s kidnapping.

It survived. And now it’s going public.

Maybe that’s crypto’s deepest metaphor:

In a world where even a founder’s fingers aren’t safe, nothing truly is.

But money always finds somewhere to go.

And the companies still standing in the ruins often become the kings of the next cycle.

Whether Ledger will be one of them—time will tell.

Or the next breach will.

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