Ledger has appointed Oded Blatman to the combined role of chief information officer and chief security officer, the Paris-based hardware wallet maker announced on September 9, 2026. The move puts one executive in charge of cyber and infrastructure security, product security, workplace security, supplier assurance and internal IT, and it lands as the industry absorbs a $1.4 billion loss from a single attack.

That figure is the Bybit hack, where funds were lost through what Ledger chief technology officer Charles Guillemet described in a June post as a single blind signature. Guillemet has also warned that artificial intelligence is making crypto attacks cheaper and faster, forcing the industry to rethink how it defends wallets and protocols.

Why does one executive now control all of Ledger's security?

The consolidation reflects a shift in how Ledger defines the attack surface. 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 employee under pressure to click quickly.

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 writes a postmortem. Placing all of those domains under Blatman is designed to narrow the blast radius when a breach occurs.

What does the AI threat actually cost?

Anthropic published research in December 2025 that quantified the risk. 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 reported an average cost of $1.22 per agent run in one GPT-5 evaluation.

Those numbers bend a founding assumption of security economics. Breaking in has always been expected to cost more than the reward for breaking in. Cheap, fast AI agents push the economics in the attacker's favor.

Guillemet has said AI can accelerate reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery and exploit chaining — work that previously took skilled researchers far longer. His answer is not more audit slogans. He has pointed to formal verification, hardware-backed key storage, offline signing and clearer transaction approval as the defenses that matter. Formal verification proves that software behaves as intended across defined conditions, rather than relying solely on human reviewers reading code.

Ledger's own security research has focused heavily on phishing, blind signing and transaction screens that display one thing while authorizing another. In crypto, the screen a user trusts can be as important as the code they never read.

Why Blatman fits the mandate

Blatman's background spans exactly the environments Ledger needs to bridge. 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 served as global CISO of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank, and as CIO and CISO of ClickSoftware, where Ledger said he led security through the company's acquisition by Salesforce.

The hire signals that Ledger treats crypto as an enterprise operations problem, not a niche code problem. Blatman has seen bank controls, custody infrastructure and enterprise software — and the operational gaps between them.

Does the hire connect to Ledger's stalled IPO?

The security appointment also plays into Ledger's capital-markets positioning. 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 roughly $4 billion. Ledger then appointed former Circle capital markets and investor relations executive John Andrews as CFO and opened a New York office on March 23, 2026.

The window then cooled. 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 context raises the stakes on this hire. A public listing would demand audited controls, investor scrutiny after every major sector exploit, and a board able to explain why Ledger's defenses outperform the software-only systems it criticizes. Blatman will have to make the security argument work inside Ledger before the company can sell it to institutions.

With IPO planning on hold but private capital still an option, Blatman's first mandate is operational: align the product, the people and the approval systems before the next attacker — human or AI-assisted — does.