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Cryptocurrency – Technology behind Ledger Hardware Wallet Blue

Ledger, a french cryptocurrency start-up has raised $75 million for taking their hardware wallets for securing storage and transactions of cryptocurrencies around the world, and, also invest further in research and development programs. The primary goal of these hardware wallets is to store the cryptocurrency such as bitcoin and ethereum holdings offline to remove the risk of being hacked.

The following are couple of products by ledger in relation to securely storing and transacting cryptocurrencies:

Ledger Blue (Bitcoins)
Ledger Nano S (Bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies)

In this post, you will learn about the technology behind Ledger’s Hardware Wallet product, namely, Ledger Wallet Blue. In one of the later posts, we will publish technology details on Ledger Nano S.

The following are details around technologies used in building Hardware Wallet, Ledger Wallet Blue:

Bitcoin payments
- Bitcoin payment and related communication options facilitated by some of the following technologies:
  - Near field communication
  - Bluetooth low energy
Security features
- Secure Bitcoin transaction management in form of ease of validation and navigation facilitated by the following:
  - LED backlit Touch screen of the device
  - Buttons on the device
- Malware and private-information leakage protection
  - ST31 contactless secure microcontroller from STMicroelectronics; It is embedded with STM32 microcontroller based on a dual chip architecture
    Figure 1. Ledger Wallet Blue Chip (image credit: ledger.fr)
Power management & access to platform features
- BlueNRG BLE radio IC and a low-power STM32 microcontroller from STMicroelectronics

Summary

In this post, you learned about high level detailss related to technology behind Ledger Hardware Wallet product, Ledger Blue.

Did you find this article useful? Do you have any questions about this article or understanding technology details on Ledger Blue? Leave a comment and ask your questions and I shall do my best to address your queries.

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Ajitesh Kumar

I have been recently working in the area of Data analytics including Data Science and Machine Learning / Deep Learning. I am also passionate about different technologies including programming languages such as Java/JEE, Javascript, Python, R, Julia, etc, and technologies such as Blockchain, mobile computing, cloud-native technologies, application security, cloud computing platforms, big data, etc. I would love to connect with you on Linkedin.
Check out my latest book titled as First Principles Thinking: Building winning products using first principles thinking.