Manufacturers of crypto hardware wallets have witnessed a bump in sales despite the ongoing bear market.
According to a report by Cointelegraph, hardware wallet makers, such as Ledger, have experienced an increase in revenue over the past few months as more users seek to withdraw their funds from centralized exchanges.
Pascal Gauthier, CEO of Ledger, told Cointelegraph that the company has yet to experience a drop in revenue. Gauthier compared this year’s revenue, which so far has remained positive, to that of the last bear market in 2018, which saw a decline of 90%.
Gauthier 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.
According to Gauthier, the company sold its most hardware wallets to date in the aftermath of Coinbase announcing first-quarter losses of $430 million, leading to widespread concern that user funds were no longer safe.
While Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong attempted to dispel the notion that the company could go bankrupt, Gauthier said it was a wake-up call for many of the exchange’s customers:
“People just realized that their crypto wasn’t safe.”
Josef Tětek, an analyst for hardware wallet provider Trezor, also claimed that his company was experiencing a surge in interest.
He explained,
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.
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