World’s Largest Hardware Wallet Maker Is Going Public and Made Important Hire

Ledger has appointed Jeremy Fox-Geen, the former Chief Financial Officer of Circle, as its new CFO while simultaneously opening a New York City office, signaling a deliberate move to professionalize its financial operations and establish the institutional credibility required for a public market listing.

Why This Hire Is Significant

Jeremy Fox-Geen is not a generic finance executive brought in to tidy the books. He led Circle’s financial operations through the stablecoin issuer’s growth phases and through multiple attempts to go public, including a SPAC merger process that required Circle to build the financial reporting infrastructure that public markets demand. That specific experience is precisely what Ledger needs at this stage.

Taking a hardware wallet company public is a different exercise than taking a software or exchange business public. Ledger’s revenue comes from device sales, enterprise subscriptions, and its Ledger Live ecosystem. Articulating that revenue model to public market investors, building the audit trails and financial controls that regulators require, and managing the earnings narrative through market cycles requires someone who has navigated that process before. Fox-Geen has.

Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier has not set a specific IPO date but has stated the firm is building the foundation for a public listing. That language, combined with a CFO hire of this profile and a New York office opening in the same announcement, describes a company in active IPO preparation rather than casual consideration.

The New York Office and What It Targets

The New York office will serve as the hub for Ledger Enterprise, the firm’s institutional custody arm. Ledger Enterprise provides secure self-custody infrastructure for hedge funds, corporate treasuries, and asset managers who want to hold digital assets without relying on third-party custodians.

The timing of that institutional push aligns with a structural shift in the market. A Fireblocks report from March 17 indicates that 40% of mid-tier hedge funds migrated from third-party custodians to hybrid self-custody models in the first quarter of 2026, driven by a desire to reduce counterparty risk. That migration represents exactly the client base Ledger Enterprise is designed to capture. A New York office puts the institutional sales team in the same city as the hedge funds, prime brokers, and asset managers making those custody decisions.

The Competitive and Regulatory Context

The Ledger announcement arrives alongside two developments that directly affect the hardware wallet market. Trezor began shipping its Safe 5 model this week, featuring a secure element chip and a gorilla glass touchscreen designed to compete directly with the Ledger Stax. The hardware wallet market is not a monopoly. Both firms are investing in product development and institutional positioning simultaneously.

The more consequential development is the Kentucky HB 380 situation covered in earlier reporting this week. The Bitcoin Policy Institute and crypto advocacy groups are actively lobbying the Kentucky Senate to remove a clause that would require hardware wallet manufacturers to build backdoor reset mechanisms into their devices. As covered in that reporting, the requirement is technically impossible to fulfill without compromising the core security guarantee that hardware wallets exist to provide.

Ledger is the most widely used hardware wallet globally. A Kentucky law requiring backdoor access would directly affect its product architecture and create a legal compliance problem in a U.S. state at the same time the company is building U.S. institutional presence and preparing for a potential U.S. public listing. The outcome of the Kentucky Senate review is not an abstract policy question for Ledger. It is a business risk the new CFO will need to factor into IPO planning.

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