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The new compatibility will let Ledger Live allow users to send, receive, and stake Cosmos' native ATOM token as well as three other Cosmos-based projects: Onomy, Quicksilver, and Persistence.
Ledger’s goal is to add more than 20 new Cosmos projects by the end of the year and Axelar is due to be added within two weeks.
Ledger Live is an app that enables Ledger users to send, receive, and stake tokens. The team believes Ledger is the first hardware wallet to offer all three functionalities for the Cosmos ecosystem.
"Supporting new assets is a challenge. We have teams dedicated to that within Ledger,” Ledger’s CTO Charles Guillemet told Decrypt. “Another thing that is really effective for us is that we have built a platform, like a development platform, allowing third-party developers to bring their own assets and their own blockchain specificity within Ledger Live. "
Called the Developer Portal, the platform makes adding new Cosmos projects easier, encouraging participation from developers to help expand their product to new chains.
"What we have built is mostly the framework allowing the developers to put all this functionality together," Guillemet said.
All Cosmos tokens will also be staked through the Ledger Live platform. When staking ATOM Ledger will operate the node itself but for other Cosmos tokens, Ledger has partnered with staking firm Chorus One.
Why is Ledger tapping Cosmos?
While Ledger admits there are "plenty of interesting" projects in the space, choosing to support Cosmos now is only a matter of priorities.
"I think now we are supporting the top 100 blockchains on the device," Guillemet said. "Now the question is: do we continue to integrate new assets within the top 200 or something? Or do we spend more time on integrating more features and morphing on the main chains?"
For the latest development, the CTO has opted to double down on the latter. This is an approach it has taken for Bitcoin and Ethereum with Solana getting a similar treatment down the line.
"I think [Cosmos] is one of the biggest innovation hubs today," he told Decrypt.
Guillemet explained, if you take a step back and look at the challenges the blockchain industry faces one of the biggest is scalability—suggesting it's the most important of the three factors in the blockchain trilemma.
There have been many attempts to solve this issue.
One idea was sharding which has been "partly discarded," another are layer-2 solutions which Guillemet thinks are "really, really promising," while others have attempted a very fast layer one but "the downside is centralization."
Still, Cosmos’ unique scalability tactics as well as its bridging technology in the Inter-blocckhain Communication (IBC) protocol is especially interesting for Guillemet and his team.