# Ledger Hires New Security Chief as AI-Driven Crypto Hacks Hit $1.4 Billion > Source: > Published: 2026-09-09 14:52:44+00:00 *Ledger is putting one executive over its IT, product security and physical controls because crypto security is now a cost problem as much as a code problem.* Paris-based Ledger, the hardware wallet maker, has appointed Oded Blatman as both chief information officer and chief security officer, the company announced on September 9, 2026. That gives one executive control of cyber and infrastructure security, product security, workplace security, supplier assurance and internal IT. It sounds like a large job because it is. The move is not just a personnel note. If you hold crypto, build wallet software, or run a company treasury with digital assets on the balance sheet, Ledger is telling you how it sees the next phase of security. The weak point is no longer only a bad line of code. It is the laptop, the signer, the supplier, the internal tool, the fake approval screen and the person under pressure to click quickly. ## The Math Has Changed Ledger's timing is hard to separate from the year crypto has had. In a June post, Ledger chief technology officer Charles Guillemet pointed to the Bybit attack, where $1.4 billion was lost from what he described as a single blind signature. CoinDesk also reported in April that Guillemet has warned artificial intelligence is making crypto attacks cheaper and faster, forcing the industry to rethink how it defends wallets and protocols. Anthropic put useful numbers under that fear. In research published in December 2025, the company said AI agents found simulated blockchain exploits worth $4.6 million on contracts that had been exploited after model knowledge cutoffs. In the same work, Anthropic said the average cost per agent run in one GPT-5 evaluation was $1.22. [MoonPay Turns Grok Into a Chat Interface for Buying and Lending Crypto](https://startupfortune.com/moonpay-turns-grok-into-a-chat-interface-for-buying-and-lending-crypto/) MoonPay's PayBox has integrated with X's Grok, letting users buy, swap, bridge, and lend crypto through natural-language chat commands, following its July 2026 launch inside ChatGPT and Claude. The feature adds Solana lending via Kamino but remains blocked in the US, UK, EU, and Australia. - [how to buy crypto through Grok AI chatbot](https://startupfortune.com/moonpay-turns-grok-into-a-chat-interface-for-buying-and-lending-crypto/) - [MoonPay PayBox integration with X Grok explained](https://startupfortune.com/moonpay-turns-grok-into-a-chat-interface-for-buying-and-lending-crypto/) That is the hard part. Security has always rested on a simple bet: breaking in should cost more than the reward for breaking in. AI bends that bet in the wrong direction. The attacks are not abstract, either. CoinDesk's report said Guillemet warned that AI can speed up reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery and exploit chaining, the work that used to take skilled researchers much longer. Ledger's own security writing has also focused on phishing, blind signing and transaction screens that show one thing while authorizing another. You should notice that. In crypto, the screen you trust can be as important as the code you never read. ## Why Blatman Fits The Moment Blatman comes from the right side of the map for this problem. Ledger said he spent five years as CIO and CISO at Fireblocks, the digital asset custody firm that competes with Ledger for institutional wallet business. Before that, he was global CISO of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank, and CIO and CISO of ClickSoftware, where Ledger said he led security through the company's acquisition by Salesforce. That is the job. Ledger does not need a security chief who treats crypto like a strange little side market. It needs someone who has seen bank controls, custody infrastructure, enterprise software and the operational mess that sits between them. Guillemet's answer to AI-assisted exploits has not been more slogans about better audits. He has pointed to formal verification, hardware-backed key storage, offline signing and clearer transaction approval as the pieces that matter. Formal verification is not magic. It is a way to prove that software behaves as intended across defined conditions, instead of relying only on reviewers reading code and hoping they caught the dangerous part. Assume breach. Then narrow the blast radius. That is where the combined CIO and CSO title matters. Internal IT, product engineering and workplace security are often treated as separate territories with separate budgets. Attackers do not respect that chart. A fake vendor email can become a compromised machine, a compromised machine can become a bad transaction approval, and one bad approval can become a balance-sheet event before anyone has time to write a postmortem. [Cloudflare Launches Wallets That Let AI Agents Autonomously Hold and Spend Money](https://startupfortune.com/cloudflare-launches-wallets-that-let-ai-agents-autonomously-hold-and-spend-money/) Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Wallets on August 4, letting AI agents hold stablecoins and autonomously pay for APIs through the x402 protocol, with spend limits set by human account owners. The move builds on Cloudflare's October 2025 Trusted Agent Protocol deal with Visa and lands amid a broader fight between Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and... - [AI agents autonomous wallet payments](https://startupfortune.com/cloudflare-launches-wallets-that-let-ai-agents-autonomously-hold-and-spend-money/) - [Cloudflare wallets for AI spending](https://startupfortune.com/cloudflare-launches-wallets-that-let-ai-agents-autonomously-hold-and-spend-money/) ## The IPO Question Has Not Gone Away The market part is awkward. In January, CoinDesk reported, citing the Financial Times, that Ledger was working with Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and Barclays on a possible New York listing that could value the company at about $4 billion. Ledger later announced the appointment of former Circle capital markets and investor relations executive John Andrews as CFO and opened a New York office on March 23, 2026. Then the window got colder. CoinDesk reported on May 13 that Ledger had put its U.S. IPO plans on hold because of market conditions, had not filed a draft S-1 with the SEC, and could raise private capital instead. That detail matters. A security company trying to sell Wall Street on custody and hardware-backed trust cannot treat security leadership as back-office housekeeping. A public listing would bring a different kind of pressure: audited controls, investor questions after every major exploit in the sector, and a board that has to explain why Ledger's defenses are stronger than the software-only systems it criticizes. Frankly, that is where this hire becomes more than a press release. Blatman will have to make Ledger's security argument work inside the company before Ledger can sell it to institutions outside the company. The useful test is not whether Ledger has a new title in the org chart. The useful test is whether one person can line up the product, the people and the approval systems before the next attacker does. Crypto security used to look like a vault problem. Now it looks like an operations problem with a wallet attached. **Also read:** [Sovereign funds managing $1 trillion will sign a crypto charter in Delhi](https://startupfortune.com/sovereign-funds-managing-1-trillion-will-sign-a-crypto-charter-in-delhi/) • [Binance Keeps Serving EU Customers Months After Missing Its MiCA Deadline](https://startupfortune.com/binance-keeps-serving-eu-customers-months-after-missing-its-mica-deadline/) • [Trezor Says ShipMonk Breach Now Exposes Home Addresses Of 80,700 Customers](https://startupfortune.com/trezor-says-shipmonk-breach-now-exposes-home-addresses-of-80700-customers/) *This article is posted in [Crypto News](https://startupfortune.com/category/crypto/), check it out for more related stories.* ## Join the discussion [Open in the community →](/community/) Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.