IOTA Partners With Ledger for Hardware Wallets

IOTA Foundation, a non-profit focused on developing blockchain technology, announced that it has formed a partnership with Ledger – a company that sells hardware cryptocurrency wallets.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a hardware wallet is, as the name suggests, a physical cryptocurrency wallet. These are supposed to be safer than other wallets which are based entirely online.

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The new partnership between IOTA Foundation and Ledger means that the former’s cryptocurrency can now be used with the latter’s hardware wallets.

“Providing the highest level of security and quality is a major focus at both Ledger and IOTA,” said Eric Larchevêque, CEO at Ledger. “We are thrilled to welcome IOTA onto the Ledger platform.”

Users of the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet will be able to protect the private key they use to access their IOTA tokens in a secure chip.

IOTA January hack

Ledger’s wallets will also integrate with IOTA’s Trinity and Romeo wallets. That will mean they can separate a user’s seed, a username-password combination that provides access to a wallet, from their computer or smartphone.

That makes life much trickier for hackers. If cyber attackers can’t immediately access someone’s account details through flimsy technology but instead have to hack into a secure piece of hardware, that will likely result in fewer cryptocurrency thefts.

This is not something that is only useful in theory either. In January of this year, hackers stole $4 million-worth of IOTA tokens.

“Hardware wallets are regarded as the safest way to store cryptocurrencies. At IOTA, we made a commitment to delivering the safest and most usable standalone cryptocurrency wallet,” said David Sønstebø, co-chair and co-founder of IOTA Foundation. “The Trinity wallet is well on its way to fulfilling that commitment, and today we are proud to announce the next step on the journey”