The Ledger Podcast Crypto's Privacy Problem: Why you don't have privacy!
Dec 5, 2025
Rand Hindi, Founder and CEO of Zama, and Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, dive into the crucial topic of privacy in cryptocurrency. They explore how fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) could revolutionize blockchain confidentiality. Rand highlights the need for privacy over mere public verifiability, while Charles discusses the balance between secure hardware and performance. The duo examines the rising demand for confidential tokens and predict that FHE will become as essential for blockchains as HTTPS is for the web.
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Keep The Trusted Surface Minimal
- Minimize the secure surface: do one thing well inside secure hardware.
- Use a simple signer for private keys and keep complex apps off the secure element.
Tiny RNG Bug, Huge Risk
- Ledger discovered a Trust Wallet RNG bug that reduced entropy to 32 bits, allowing seed recovery.
- They responsibly disclosed it and helped users migrate, avoiding mass loss.
Verifiability ≠ Public Data
- Blockchains were designed for public verifiability, not data exposure.
- Cryptography (ZK, FHE) can deliver verifiability without revealing private data.