Bitcoin Hardware Wallet Ledger Begins Monero Integration

Ledger – the leading bitcoin and cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer – has officially begun preparing to support the anonymous cryptocurrency Monero. The Ledger development team, led by CTO Nicolas Bacca, revealed its integration plan for Monero in various online communities including Reddit yesterday.

Ledger and Monero Make a Good Pair

The codebases of all Ledger products including its hardware wallets Ledger Blue and Nano S are available for review and contribution on a Github open source repository. Developers can transparently and closely track the progress of the Ledger development team’s process of integrating Monero. (This is one of the coolest things about open source projects.)

Initially, a Ledger developer – under the online alias Cslashm – first disclosed the Ledger development team’s plans to release alpha code for Monero integration on the Nano S and Ledger Blue hardware wallets. Upon the release of its alpha code, Cslashm emphasized that the team would streamline the integration process, moving to beta testing and ultimately releasing the final code.

“As we know that ‘Soon’ is not a correct answer to ‘when?, we plan an initial alpha code for the end of September. Until then, do not hesitate to comment the specification on github,” wrote the Ledger crypto developer.

In late August, many analysts were predicting the price of Monero to rise substantially after the integration of the popular cryptocurrency by Bithumb. The South Korea-based exchange has the largest daily trading volume among all cryptocurrency trading platforms globally, so having Monero listed was a big deal.

Within a period of two weeks, the price of Monero, which had struggled to sustain momentum and increase in value for years relative to its rival anonymous cryptocurrency Dash, made significant gains. Monero’s price surged from US$54 to US$145, securing its position as the eighth largest cryptocurrency in the world, with a market cap of over US$2.2 billion.

Although the value of Monero decreased in subsequent days due to a major correction within the cryptocurrency market, other leading currencies also plunged in value. As a result, Monero was able to secure its position as one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies.

Since 2016, analysts attributed the success of Dash to its efficient marketing and its strategic partnership with widely recognized platforms such as multi-cryptocurrency wallet Jaxx. Despite its poor reputation in the cryptocurrency sector for its presale of tokens, Dash managed to become the seventh-largest cryptocurrency in the market.

Monero had previously lacked such support from large-scale platforms with millions of active users. It also had lower liquidity in comparison to other cryptocurrencies. However, due to the integration of Monero by Bithumb and Ledger, the anonymous cryptocurrency will likely see a significant surge in demand from both casual investors and professional traders.

Ledger remains one of the more popular and secure bitcoin wallet platforms out there. It has raised over US$10 million from prominent venture capital firms. These funds will help the company establish factories in France to meet exponentially increasing demand from its intentional customer base.

Already, Monero has nearly caught up with Dash in terms of market cap and has surpassed the latter in daily trading volume. The adoption and integration of Monero by Bithumb and Ledger will likely trigger increased interest and demand from a wider range of investors over the upcoming months.