3 min readIt’s a busy afternoon at Le Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, the venue chosen by French entrepreneur Michael Amar to host his conference, Paris Blockchain Week. The underground mall, located next to the Louvre, houses the Inverted Pyramid—made famous by the best-selling book The Da Vinci Code, in which a cryptographer plays a significant role. In this context, it seems almost logical to meet Nicolas Bacca there, one of the faces of modern cryptography and one of the blockchain industry architects.
“I’ve worked in consumer hardware security for more than 20 years and have started several companies in the space, notably Ledger.”
Indeed, he co-founded the French unicorn that built unhackable hardware wallets used by millions. Ledger remains a cornerstone of digital asset custody and a rare success story in a volatile industry.
After stepping down, he briefly launched Smoo.th, a smart wallet project aiming to redefine browser-based crypto security. Then came ZKNox, founded in 2025 with two fellow cryptographers from Ledger and Thales. This new venture focuses on the promise of zero-knowledge cryptography, a technology he believes could reshape how we use Bitcoin itself.
“Once we have zero-knowledge proof, we’ll be able to settle a lot more things on top of Bitcoin… If we can use Bitcoin to settle other protocols, I think it can solve that problem.”
“Bitcoin gave me a business model”
Despite being a co-founder of one of the world’s leading crypto companies, Nicolas Bacca came to Bitcoin not that early—but early enough to change his destiny.
“My first connection with Bitcoin was in 2012. That’s when I read the whitepaper. I had designed a smart card that could hold secrets, but I had no business model. Bitcoin gave me that. So I’m very grateful for Satoshi. Thank you, Satoshi.”
On top of giving him a reason to build, Bitcoin taught him economics, something digital assets often do for their curious adopters, since the concept of money is rarely taught in schools. Yet it’s still striking to hear it from someone who builds the infrastructure of trust.
“I was absolutely economically illiterate before I discovered Bitcoin. I started from a technical point of view, and it opened my mind… I began looking more into money creation.”
An exploration that brought a fair share of disillusionment.
“Money is fake,” he says without blinking, when asked what money is. A provocative remark, but one that may have started with a small act of childhood rebellion.
“My first memory with money goes back to when I was a child. I started printing fake bills. I was kind of my own central bank, and I gave notes to my parents to get stuff… The amounts were not very realistic, unless France was hit by massive inflation.”
He laughs. But this early experiment hinted at the deeper themes that would later define his career: how we define value, where we assign trust, and what it means to secure the intangible. Trust, after all, is the real currency. And he’s still working to secure it.
Adoption, disillusionment, and the real world
Today, Bacca remains deeply involved in the ecosystem, not just as an entrepreneur, but as an investor, advisor, and mentor. His fingerprints are on some of France’s most promising crypto startups: Bitstack (a Bitcoin fintech), Spiko (a tokenized money market fund manager), Intercellar (a tokenized wine distribution company), Bubblemaps (an analytics firm), and the new blockchain Hyli. His name often appears on roundtables.
“If I find a good team, I’ll invest in its future, even if I don’t really understand what they’re building now… But I focus on technical projects, especially zero-knowledge proofs, security, and hardware.”
And then there’s his more sparkling portfolio, far from the digital realm, where he reconciles his investments with his personal taste. Alongside other well-known French crypto entrepreneurs:
“I have invested in a champagnerie. They pay dividends in champagne bottles, so that’s good because I get a lot of champagne every year. That’s even one reason why I’m invited to parties: I’m famous for bringing champagne wherever I go.”
Despite the success stories and bottles of bubbly, he remains a skeptic of surface-level narratives in crypto, especially those that revolve around mainstream adoption.
“The current adoption is very different from what I expected. Anybody that entered the space a long time ago expected to have payments with digital assets everywhere. We made finance smoother, yes, but we didn’t break the status quo regarding the payments part. Quite the opposite, actually.”
And as the world debates ETFs, custodians, and convenience, Bacca remains fiercely committed to first principles, especially when it comes to choosing between self-custody and investment products.
“Self-custody for sure. As a co-founder of Ledger, yeah.”
