Ledger Wants Its Latest Crypto Wallet to Take on Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Orb

The internet is an increasingly murky space. A report from the generative voice platform Resemble AI indicates scammers stole $347.2 million via deepfakes in the second quarter of 2025 alone. Videos across the web show doctored footage of politicians, CEOs, and celebrities like Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks promoting fraudulent crypto investments, making personalized romantic pleas, and attempting to initiate targeted wire transfers. Meanwhile, everyone’s feeds are increasingly filled with AI-generated slop that seems all too real as platforms like OpenAI’s Sora 2 rapidly advance. So what’s the solution? What is to be done? Well, if you ask people in the crypto community, the solution is to throw some more crypto at the problem. 

Sam Altman wants to tackle online identification with his controversial crypto project World, which relies on orb-shaped devices that scan people’s irises to create unique, encrypted digital codes designed to allow individuals to authenticate themselves online. The project, formerly known as Worldcoin, maintains that each user’s biometric data is encrypted and stored only on their personal device, but it has still raised privacy concerns from governments and concerned citizens around the globe. 

World now appears to have some competition: The crypto wallet firm Ledger introduced its new Nano Gen5 model this week, but the company is no longer billing the product as a hardware wallet. Instead, it’s calling it a “signer,” to put more emphasis on the identity-verification services it provides. 

“Outdated language led users to believe that their device actually stored their crypto or was merely to be used as a vault,” Ledger content writer Ola Kalejaye said in a new announcement. “The term ‘signer’ defines the device’s core purpose: it’s your cryptographic ‘Proof of You,’ giving you a secure foundation to authorize every action and control your digital life.”

The new Nano “signer” uses a customer’s private keys—the string of letters and numbers that enables access to a specific blockchain—to create a cryptographic signature, which can authorize crypto asset transfers. Crypto stakeholders envision this kind of system as a way to confirm that our future online activity was performed by a human, without explicitly identifying that person. 

While Ledger is seizing the moment and taking advantage of the renewed discussion around crypto and identity verification, Kalejaye explained that the rebranding is also intended to clear up some public misconceptions about what purpose his company’s wallets serve in the first place:

The conversation around hardware wallets also led to the common perception that managing a 24-word recovery phrase was a complex burden. This reinforced the view that only tech-savvy users could handle true digital ownership.

Today’s reality is far different from the earliest days of Bitcoin. Now, with modern backup solutions and a refined onboarding experience, Ledger makes digital ownership a seamless experience, even for users who are brand new to the decentralized world.

These common misconceptions are a direct obstacle to the mass adoption of self-custody. In reality, your crypto assets exist on the blockchain, and your Ledger signer secures the one thing that gives you control of them: your private keys. By generating and protecting this key within a certified Secure Element chip, your signer provides a fortress against online threats. 

Some of the new wording feels like tweaking around the margins of Ledger’s marketing strategy in an attempt to broaden the company’s appeal beyond devoted crypto enthusiasts, teasing the possibility that people could one day use the Nano Gen5 as a broader form of identification on the web. But the device itself does have some new features designed to streamline functionality. 

The new $179 Nano Gen5 works in tandem with its rebranded software app, formerly known as Ledger Live, which is now called the Ledger Wallet. The Nano’s touchscreen aims to display transactions in plain language, so users can verify what they’re approving and avoid scams, AI bots, and phishing attacks. Ledger also partnered with the decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch, offering a direct connection for crypto swaps.

Perhaps most notably, Ledger collaborated with storied iconographer Susan Kare, the designer behind the original Macintosh icons in 1982. Kare designed multiple sets of collectible badges that can personalize the new Nano Gen5. If you want to broaden your product’s appeal, who better to recruit than one of the most influential Mac designers of all time?