Reading 3 min Views 4 Published Updated
Hardware wallet company Ledger is postponing the launch of Ledger Recover after a week of intense criticism from the cryptocurrency community.
In a May 23 Spaces Twitter post, joined by over 13,000 users, Ledger Chairman and CEO Pascal Gauthier said it was a “humiliating experience” and a hard lesson in communication:
“The experience was very humiliating. We misreported the launch of this product; we didn’t mean to take people by surprise. Therefore, we understand the direction of the community and apologize for the misunderstanding.”
Gauthier said that in response to concerns, the firm will accelerate its plans to open up most of its codebase. It will start with the core components of the operating system and Ledger Recover, which it says “will not be released until this work is complete.”
Charles Guilleme, Chief Technology Officer of Ledger, said that in the coming days a white paper on the recovery protocol will go open source along with technical blog posts to “explain the principles of recovery” and more detailed explanations of how the process works.
“It will be very easy for every cryptocurrency and security expert to familiarize themselves with the protocol in order to get more guarantees and understand how it works.”
Guilleme noted that this would also allow developers to create their own fallback provider for seed phrase shards, rather than using the one provided by Ledger.
“This has always been something important for Ledger, but this recent event showed just how important it is to the community, which is why we decided to make this open source process a priority,” he added.
Ledger’s mission is, and will always be, to provide our users with the right tools to own their digital value securely.
We have decided to accelerate our open-sourcing roadmap to bring more verifiability to everything we do.
A thread pic.twitter.com/Dv0jBCM4Ys
— Charles Guillemet (@P3b7_) May 23, 2023
Ledger recently told Cointelegraph that he “will continue to open source more and more of our code until we reach the same level as the Raspberry Pi.”
Related: Crypto Community Responds to Ledger Wallet Recovery Passphrase Service
Ledger found itself in a PR nightmare after it unveiled plans on May 16 to implement a key recovery tool called Ledger Recover. The firmware update will allow users who have lost their private seed phrase to recover it with an additional feature.
I want to address the feedback over Ledger Recover, the way it was communicated, and share our path forward. Read my letter and join our town hall with our leadership team to learn more.
https://t.co/2hlPrMwzaN pic.twitter.com/juVBOpWeeG
—Pascal Gauthier @Ledger (@_pgauthier) May 23, 2023
The firm faced backlash from some members of the cryptocurrency community who believed it would add a “backdoor” to remove the user’s private keys from the device.
Asia Express: Ripple and Visa Join HK CBDC Pilot, Huobi Blames, GameFi Token Up 300%