DeFi Visions: Nicolas Bacca

In DeFi Visions, a series of video interviews, the 1inch Network talks to the most prominent people in the DeFi space. This post offers key takeaways from a recent interview with Nicolas Bacca, Co-Founder and Innovation Lead at Ledger.

Since its launch in 2014, Ledger has developed security and infrastructure solutions for cryptocurrencies, as well as blockchain applications. It is currently the leading and most popular hardware wallet provider.

Nicolas has been involved with smart card technologies before he first got into crypto in 2012. Stepping into BTC pushed him to create BTChip and defined his path to Ledger.

Speaking about the Ledger wallet’s main features, Nicolas says that the hardware wallet offers an alternative to software wallet in terms of security. “It solves at least the problem of vulnerability, but it is not a silver bullet. ‘Still, pay attention to what you are doing’, that’s what I would say to newcomers,” he adds.

Nicolas compares the recent rising sales of hardware wallets with the previous bear market cycle in 2019 when “the sales were very low because usually, they are very correlated to the people’s interest in crypto.” But Nicolas says that this time everything is different because “people don’t want to put assets in centralized places anymore.”

Meanwhile, as NFTs are having their moment, Nicolas shares plans of improving security for both users and artists: “We want to bring something different to the market, an experience where everyone will be secured. We want to offer artists the best possible security so that they can check they are getting revenue properly, that nothing has been corrupted, and that they won’t fall victim to scams.”

Expanding on the subject of NFTs, Nicolas says they can have proper utility. “We will have plenty of new use cases of NFTs in the future,” he adds. “We can just consider them as a digital property in which you can interact with different protocols. So people will probably stop saying ‘I interact with NFT’, they will say, ‘I own my house, I hold something.”

Commenting on this bear market, Nicolas suggests that it differs from previous ones in understanding the reasons for the collapse and the way to fix it. “First, the problem is in the global economy, and BTC will probably play a role in fixing inflation popping up everywhere. We can think of more solutions to put BTC in the hands of everybody.”

“We’ve been running solutions that are too centralized. This bear market will allow us to understand our mistakes, to build more decentralized things that are easier to audit,” he explains.

The biggest lesson that the industry can learn from collapses, Nicolas observes, is that everything should be less centralized. “Blockchain should bring transparency. We used it and we broke it,” he adds.

Turning to the subject of DAOs, Nicolas says it is necessary to motivate more people to participate in DAOs that are similar to political systems. “Today, we mostly have a few people holding most of the votes, which is not impressive. It’s fully decentralized, but maybe in a way that looks a bit messy,” he elaborates. “Once we manage people to take part more in DAOs, we find the best way to fix our political system where we can also see few voters.”

Discussion, Nicolas says, is the way to create a good regulation where everybody is listening to each other. Speaking of possible regulatory scenarios, he assumes: “It can end up with stricter KYC, which has many favors. On the most extreme part, there is KYC, where users are providing all their documents when interacting with a centralized chain. That’s pretty bad if we generalize that.”

Still, Nicolas says he believes that, like with DAOs, smarter KYCs can help to fix issues in the real world.

Finally, commenting on the role of the metaverse, he says that it has to lead to more decentralization. He concludes: “This time we will build solutions that will use our content. Revenue expected from these solutions will be distributed to everybody.”

Watch the full interview with Nicolas Bacca on The 1inch Network’s YouTube channel.