After facing severe backlash from the cryptocurrency community, Ledger, a provider of hardware wallets, has announced a delay in the release of its new key recovery feature. Pascal Gauthier, Ledger’s CEO, informed users in a letter that the firm will refrain from launching the feature until its code has been shared. To discuss the issue further, the company has scheduled a Twitter Spaces session for 12:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday.
Last week, Ledger announced its forthcoming service, dubbed Ledger Recover. This feature aims to allow users to store encrypted backups of their seed phrases with a trio of custodians. If users misplace or forget their seed phrases, they can still restore their private keys. This optional feature would necessitate a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification.
Criticism from Crypto Community
Immediately following the announcement, Ledger was bombarded with criticism from the cryptocurrency community. Many voiced their concerns about sharing seed phrases with anyone apart from the wallet owners themselves. The crypto community felt that Ledger had betrayed them, given that it had previously insisted that Ledger wallet private keys would never leave the device.
Detractors also pointed out potential risks such as custodians getting hacked, KYC providers leaking data, and law enforcement seizing control of Ledger users’ data. Adding to these concerns, the code for the Recover feature is not open-source, which prevents auditing of the proposed custody mechanism’s security. In contrast to some of its competitors, Ledger does not publish all its code, opting instead to have its product tested by a team of handpicked security researchers.
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Learning from the Backlash
Acknowledging the backlash, Gauthier stated in his letter that the company had learned a valuable lesson. While parts of Ledger’s code have been open-sourced in the past, he announced plans to make more of the code available soon.
“We have made the decision to accelerate the open-sourcing roadmap! We will include as much of the Ledger operating system as possible, starting with core components of the OS, and Ledger Recover, which won’t be released until this work is complete,” Gauthier wrote.
Gauthier went on to stress that the provision of key recovery services is crucial for ushering in a new wave of crypto users, for whom self-custody might be too daunting.
“The majority of users in crypto today either don’t own their private keys and/or are putting their private keys at risk using less secure forms of self-custody, and hard-to-use forms of storing and securing their seed phrase,” the letter stated.
