Ledger has lost the trust of users. The company dedicated to cold wallets has decided to release an update that directly goes against its original philosophy. A change in strategy that has generated a lot of criticism and shows how difficult it is to combine security with economic benefits.
The new feature is a subscription service called “Recovery.” to use it requires registration and identification. This contrasts with the initial idea of Ledger which is to have an encrypted device where you personally store the cryptocurrencies.
This is not what Ledger promised
In other words, we have gone from a company focused on offering hardware so that the user is responsible for their security to betting on a paid software system, where trust passes into the hands of the company’s servers.
Las reviews have not been long in coming. Users have expressed themselves on social networks pointing out that it has “broken trust“, is a “terrible idea” and how dangerous this system can be.
Some even point to the possible existence of a secret door in that backup system that could compromise the security of their systems. It’s an idea that comes in part from some security incidents that Ledger has had in the past.
Ledger’s response has not taken long either. Charles Guillemet, his CTO, has explained what “there is no back door so that no one, not us, not a vendor, not even a very gifted hacker can access it.”
“Ledger Recover is an optional subscription for users who want a backup of their secret recovery phrase. You don’t have to use it and you can continue to manage your recovery phrase yourself if that’s why you bought a ledger.” described the company in a statement.
One of the proposals is that Ledger Recover should be a totally separate function from walletsinstead of updating the current Ledger Nano X.
As remember david schwartzCTO of Ripple, the idea original de Ledger was to offer the possibility of storing private keys in a security chip with a technology similar to that of credit cards and that no software could extract these keys from the chip.
This idea is broken with the new function of Recover. It is an optional update, but the fact that it is included has alerted practically all Ledger users, whose idea to bet on them was to have a physical device to store the keys of their cryptocurrencies.
Imagen | Amjith S
In Xataka | Panic among crypto investors, rise of cold wallets: how cold wallets work
