After receiving significant backlash from the cryptocurrency community, Ledger has made the decision to delay the launch of its private key recovery service. The company cites concerns around possible security flaws and the need for greater openness as the reasons for this decision.
Pascal Gauthier, the CEO of Ledger, sent an open letter to the company’s customers in which he said that the company will not launch the new feature until sharing the code for it. Additionally, the firm addressed the matter on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time at a Twitter Spaces session.
Ledger Community: We've heard your feedback on Ledger Recover.
— Ledger (@Ledger) May 22, 2023
To share an update and discuss the top items we heard, we're holding a town hall with our leadership team @_pgauthier, @iancr, @P3b7_, & @BTChip on Tuesday at 6:30pm CEST/12:30pm EST.https://t.co/qfhxPKbHjk
Ledger made the announcement about their new service, which is called Ledger Recover, one week ago. This service will let customers to keep encrypted backups of their seed phrases with a group of three custodians. After that, proprietors of ledgers will have the ability to regain their private keys even in the event that they misplace or forget their seed phrases. A know-your-customer (KYC) verification will be necessary in order to use the opt-in functionality.
The cryptocurrency community as a whole was quick to criticise Ledger for the concept of sharing seed phrases with anybody other than wallet users. This criticism occurred almost immediately after the idea was introduced to the market. On Twitter, Reddit, and other websites, a number of users vented their anger by writing furious messages in which they said they felt deceived by Ledger since the company had previously stated that the Ledger wallet private keys would never leave a device.
Some of the opponents also brought out possible dangers, such as the possibility of the custodians being hacked, data being leaked by KYC providers, and law enforcement agencies gaining access to the data of Ledger users. Others pointed out that the code for the Recover feature does not have an open-source licence, which means that there is no way to verify that the proposed custody method is secure.
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.
Pascal Gauthier (CEO – Ledger) wrote
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.
— Pascal Gauthier @Ledger (@_pgauthier) May 23, 2023
🧵👉 https://t.co/2hlPrMwzaN pic.twitter.com/juVBOpWeeG
