Louise Ivan, Co-Founder and CEO of Ryder – Interview Series

Louise Ivan, Co-Founder and CEO of Ryder, is a pioneering entrepreneur at the intersection of Bitcoin, Web3, and self-custody innovation. Before founding Ryder in 2022, he played a major role in scaling the Stacks ecosystem as Growth Lead at the Stacks Foundation, where he managed a treasury exceeding 100 million STX to drive community growth, governance, and developer engagement. With a background spanning blockchain advocacy through Freehold and strategic experience in data and IT analytics, Louise has built a career on advancing Bitcoin’s usability and decentralized infrastructure.

Ryder is a next-generation hardware wallet company redefining digital asset security through its TapSafe recovery system, which eliminates traditional seed phrases. Using the Shamir Secret Sharing algorithm, Ryder distributes encrypted recovery shares across physical tags and trusted contacts, offering a user-friendly, self-custodial solution for Web3 ownership. Backed by $1.6 million in funding, Ryder’s flagship product, the Ryder One, aims to make self-custody intuitive, secure, and social—bridging the gap between security and accessibility in digital asset management.

You started your career as a community member in the Stacks ecosystem before moving into leadership roles there and eventually co-founding Ryder. What experiences from that journey prepared you to take the leap into founding your own company?

Starting as a community member taught me how to build without permission. In the early days of Stacks, I wasn’t an employee or a founder, just someone deeply obsessed with the mission. I believed in what they were building after seeing a TED talk of Stacks co-founder, Muneeb. Because of that, I showed up, contributed, and figured things out along the way. I learned to organize, ship, and solve problems without a playbook or funding. Later, as I took on leadership roles at Hiro and the Stacks Foundation, I saw firsthand how ecosystems grew, how protocols scaled, how products were built, how narratives shaped direction and how community was the glue that ties it all together. The evolution from a speculator to an active community member, to eventually building the community and leading ecosystem growth through partnerships and integrations, gave me the foundation I needed as a founder. I’ve always been driven by growth and curiosity. Becoming a founder felt like the natural next step; it was the chance to challenge myself in new ways, solve bigger and harder problems, and keep learning through building.

Along the way, we’ve learned and seen how capital should work, how our team should be mindful of capital flow, especially after seeing several crypto startups raise millions for products that didn’t actually solve real problems. They chased narratives, hype cycles, optimized for those short-term vanity metrics, and burned through that funding with little accountability. Most of those projects disappeared as fast as they rose. When we started Ryder with just a $5K grant from the Stacks Foundation, we made a deliberate choice to build differently. We built with a lot of passion and purpose; people who know our team can attest to that. We focused on solving a real problem, with relentless execution, while building toward sustainable growth and profitability. Our collective past experiences have shaped how we operate, how we make decisions, and how we build things made to last.

Ryder’s core innovation is replacing traditional seed phrases with TapSafe recovery. Can you explain how this works in practice and why you believe it’s a game-changer for crypto adoption?

In this industry, your assets are only as safe as your security practices. Over the years, backing up a crypto wallet meant writing down a 12 to 24-word seed phrase on paper and hiding it somewhere safe. A seed phrase is a series of words that represent your wallet access, or private key. It’s the single point of failure for all your digital assets.

However, this system is flawed. Your assets solely depend on how well you safeguard them. The irony is that while crypto is built on decentralization, the seed phrase centralizes all your security into one fragile piece of paper. Seed phrases are all or nothing; if you lose it once, your wallet is gone forever. In fact, billions of dollars in crypto have vanished because of misplaced or stolen seed phrases; some estimates suggest over 20% of all Bitcoin has been lost forever.

The truth is, we, as humans, aren’t great at remembering or safeguarding secrets. That’s why we built TapSafe, a recovery method designed to make self-custody simple and more secure.

With Ryder One, you don’t need to write or remember anything. TapSafe lets you create a secure backup in under 60 seconds, just tap your Ryder One to the Ryder Mobile App and Recovery Tags. It’s powered by Shamir Secret Sharing, a cryptographic method that splits your secret into multiple parts. No single piece can unlock your wallet alone, but when combined, they restore full access. This is the same proven cryptographic standard trusted for decades in banking, government, and aerospace security.

You can expand your recovery setup at any time, add more Recovery Tags, include trusted friends or family as Recovery Contacts, or even keep a traditional seed phrase as a fallback. The goal is simple: build better security habits and remove the stress that usually comes with self-custody and crypto management.

The best example I can give is when I onboarded my own mom. With most wallets, the process would’ve been a nightmare: too many steps, too much jargon, and way too stressful. With Ryder, it was the opposite. She didn’t need to worry about security habits or write anything down. I’m one of her recovery contacts, my brother is another, and she also has a Recovery Tag plus a backup on her Ryder App. Together, these give her multiple ways to regain access anytime. It’s simple, human, and secure, exactly how crypto ownership should feel.

With TapSafe, your crypto stays entirely in your control. We’re not changing who owns your assets; we’re changing how effortless it feels to protect them.

The use of Shamir Secret Sharing in Ryder One is quite unique. What made you choose this approach, and how do you balance technical sophistication with simplicity for end users?

Our Shamir Secret Sharing algorithm is unique. It was formulated and developed by my co-founder and CTO, Marvin Janssen. As the user experience is paramount, we started reasoning from the perspective of our end customer and what would be most intuitive for them. We then formulated the following requirements:

1. No single backup should provide access to the wallet.
2. No single backup should reveal any information about the wallet.
3. Backups should not reveal how many backups exist.
4. Customers should have the ability to create more backups later.
5. All future backups generated by Ryder One should be compatible with each other.
6. Any combination of backups should be able to recover a wallet on a different Ryder One.
7. Backups generated by a Ryder One that was recovered using pre-existing backups should be compatible with those pre-existing backups. That is to say, backups generated with a new device should be able to mix with backups generated by an old device.

Most open source Shamir algorithms do not meet any of these requirements. They normally split a secret based on fixed input parameters for the threshold and total number of shares to generate. The internal data used to generate the shares is generated once and then discarded.

Our algorithm meets all the aforementioned requirements. It creates a generator that is safely stored in the Secure Element. The generator is then used to produce as many backup shares as desired. The recovery process on a new device also reconstructs the generator. It allows the new device to generate backup shares that are compatible with all backup shares, present and future.

It is exactly the technical sophistication that provides simplicity for the end-user. Our customers expect that they can use any combination of backups to recover their wallet. We therefore needed to create our own version of Shamir Secret Sharing to meet that expectation. 

Hardware wallets are often seen as difficult for mainstream users. How is Ryder addressing usability to make crypto storage more accessible without sacrificing security?

Most hardware wallets were built for the early adopters and developers, not for everyday people. I still remember ordering my first hardware wallet back in 2017. It sat in its box for more than six months before I finally opened it. Julien Nerée, our CPO, who also got his first hardware wallet around that time, was baffled that even after 5 years of getting his hardware wallet, the product itself hadn’t really evolved much. What does this say for us? There wasn’t really a team focused on creating that human-centred product experience that exists in non-crypto startups. One that is so intuitive, you don’t even need a manual to use it. It made us question how secure owning crypto felt if it was as natural as using your phone.

Ryder One removes friction at every step. No cables, no Bluetooth and no Wi-Fi. It’s 100% offline and powered entirely by NFC. Every detail of the UI and UX you see on the Ryder app and Ryder One has been refined through countless iterations. We run multiple design sessions every week, all focused on reaching that level of simplicity that makes the experience effortless for everyone. You just tap to create, tap to send, and tap to recover. Setup takes less than a minute, and recovery is just as effortless with TapSafe. Behind the scenes, you still get the highest chip security standard with an EAL6+ secure element, but the user experience is designed to feel human, not technical. That’s how we make self-custody both accessible and safe.

You previously managed over $100M in treasury at Stacks. How has that experience influenced the way you approach building and scaling Ryder?

Managing a large treasury at the Foundation taught me one thing: discipline scales trust. When you’re responsible for that kind of capital in a decentralized ecosystem, you learn to think long-term. Every allocation and every partnership has to balance growth with accountability.

That mindset shaped how we built Ryder. Hardware is capital-intensive from inventory and supply chain to purchase cycles, audits, and production runs that demand precision. We apply the same treasury discipline to how we build and scale: spend deliberately, measure obsessively, and always tie execution back to user trust.

Most foundations operate like a black box, but we’ve done the opposite at Ryder. Every team member knows our burn rate, our cash on hand, and where every dollar goes. Transparency isn’t just a value that we preach; it’s how we build alignment internally. That’s also why our team member retention rate is so high. Everyone’s rowing in the same direction – fully aware of the mission, the numbers behind it, and the reasons behind every decision we’ve made. 

At Stacks, deploying capital wasn’t about hype; it was about empowering builders and creating sustainable value. At Ryder, that same principle drives us to build real products that make crypto ownership simple, human, and secure for the next billion owners.

Having led growth at Stacks and now as CEO of Ryder, what lessons have you learned about building and scaling communities in crypto?

Leading growth at Stacks taught me that people don’t rally around technology; they rally around belief. In crypto, you can have the best product in the world, but if people don’t feel part of something bigger, it won’t scale. I also learned that markets may be driven by price action, but communities are sustained by conviction. When the charts go down, communication and consistency matter most. At Ryder, we don’t chase attention; we earn it through execution. That’s how you build a community that sticks by making people feel they’re building the future with you, not just watching from the sidelines.

Security and recovery are two of the biggest barriers for new crypto users. How do you see Ryder’s approach fitting into the broader push to make Web3 more user-friendly?

As Marvin, our CTO, likes to say, we build bridges, not islands.

Ryder’s philosophy has always been about openness and continuity. We don’t want users to depend on us; we want them to depend on the standards we help shape. That’s why our roadmap includes fully open-sourcing everything, from the TapSafe recovery protocol to our device schematics.

In practice, that means even if Ryder the company disappears one day, your wallet and assets won’t. You’ll still be able to recover it. Our first major step is making TapSafe fully open-source so it can interoperate with legacy methods like seed phrases and allow other projects to create safer, more human-friendly recovery systems. We’ve seen wallet recovery wallets evolve over time – from early wallet files (wallet.dat), to seed phrases and now TapSafe. We believe that TapSafe represents the next evolution for seed phrases as it combines both security and usability. If we want Web3 to reach billions, security shouldn’t be a tradeoff; it should be built-in, seamless and reliable.

The hardware wallet space is getting more competitive, with both established players and new entrants. What do you see as Ryder’s biggest differentiator in this market?

Our biggest differentiator is how human the experience feels. Many new users don’t realize that the standard way of securing assets, writing down a seed phrase on paper, is one of the weakest links. Imagine you’re new to crypto and you’re instantly greeted by these 12 or 24 words, and you have 0 clue what to do about it. We’re so cyberpunk/digital, yet to secure your wallet, we ask users to write words on a piece of paper. If it gets lost, stolen, or destroyed, and once that happens, the assets are gone forever.

At Ryder, we set out to change that by combining security with usability. Ryder One introduces TapSafe Recovery, which blends Shamir’s Secret Sharing with NFC technology. Instead of writing down a seed phrase, users simply tap their Ryder One to Recovery Tags and their phone to back up or restore their wallet.

The beauty of NFC is that it’s familiar. People already use it every day to pay, get on the train or bus, or even pair new electronics. We took that same simplicity and applied it to crypto recovery. TapSafe gives users a safety net that’s both simple and reliable, removing the fear of loss while keeping full control in their hands. What’s even more fascinating about TapSafe is that it’s flexible; it lets users create more backups by simply adding more Recovery tags or including trusted friends and family as Recovery contacts. Users can even mix and match it depending on their security threshold. It also has the option to fall back to your traditional seed phrase.

Looking five years ahead, what’s your vision for Ryder and the role you hope it plays in the future of digital identity and crypto security?

Five years from now, we see Ryder as the bridge between digital ownership and real-world identity. We’re starting with crypto, but the principle goes far beyond it. You should be able to own, prove, and recover what’s yours with the same simplicity as tapping your phone.

Hardware will play a critical role in that future. As our lives move deeper into digital spaces, trust won’t come from passwords or platforms; it’ll come from ownership that lives with you, in your hands, not on someone else’s server. That’s the future we’re building.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Ryder.