Ledger Recover: A Message From Pascal Gauthier, Chairman & CEO at Ledger

Everyone — I want to address the concern over Ledger Recover, the way it was announced, and share with you our improved path forward.

Over the past two years at Ledger we have made great strides toward our mission of underpinning the world of digital assets with security, bringing more people onboard with access to features through easy-to-use experiences, all without ever compromising on security. This is what we will continue doing with Ledger Recover, Provided by Coincover.

But our unintentional communication mistake took everyone by surprise and affected our customer’s ability to accurately understand Ledger Recover, its role for the growing crypto community, and for Ledger’s future offering. We apologise for the way this was communicated. We never meant to surprise you. In fact, this is exactly why we have been talking about this product publicly for well over a year. We have learned a lot from this experience and you will see that in future communications.

We believe wholeheartedly in the need for a service like Ledger Recover—those of us who have been in the space for a long time, over a decade in my case, have a responsibility to ensure everyone can be self-sovereign and can have self-custody over their digital value. This is the ethos of crypto. The main pain point for crypto self-custody adoption is precisely the problem of seed phrase recovery. 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.

I will repeat, our mission is to make crypto secure and easy to use. We need to do this together, in the right way. 

What is the solution going forward?

Security (always) & increased transparency!

Ledger never compromises on Security. Ledger is the only Certified hardware wallet selected by Consumer Reports as the best hardware wallet and reinforced by security experts. We have almost a decade of experience securing your private keys that govern your assets with uncompromising quality and improvements. When it comes to security, resilience over time is essential. Our Donjon security team is committed to review not only Ledger’s firmware and hardware updates, but that of the entire ecosystem, with full autonomy from Ledger leadership. This will never change.

Now let’s increase transparency.

The vast majority of Ledger’s codebase is already open source! Open source isn’t necessarily a security feature (Ledger co-founder Éric Larchevêque wrote a clear and accurate tweet explaining this if you would like to dive deeper on the topic.) but it is definitely a transparency feature that helps developers and security experts review the code and make sure it isn’t malicious.

Today, all 150 Ledger Nano applications, Ledger Live, and a portion of the operating system (you can explore the code on GitHub here) are open source. We have seen a high volume of apps submitted and each App is reviewed by our Donjon security team, as it is imperative that more developers continue to build on a secure operating system. 

So what’s next?

It’s always been our intention to continue to open source as much of our code as possible, to make it auditable. Ledger’s open source commitment is tied to one of our company values: Transparency. 

So, 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. Furthermore, we will open source the Ledger Recover protocol, enabling the community to have as much choice as possible over your self-custody, in addition to the service being fully optional. This roadmap will be shared and updated by our CTO and engineering team.

We are doing all of this to move forward together bringing security and self custody to the next wave of crypto users. We’ve listened to our customers; we are accelerating a roadmap that’s been in progress, and regardless, the security of your Ledger remains unchanged. Remember: we are doing this for more transparency going forward; this does not change the security of your device. If you want additional security measures enabled to prevent unauthorized access to your funds, you can enable the passphrase feature, which is not included in the Ledger Recover backup and can be a fully trustless feature.

Again, thank you for your feedback. You have helped us to make Ledger a better company and our entire community stronger.

We remain on our mission to make crypto secure and easy to use, I hope to have you along with us.

Onward!

Pascal Gauthier, Chairman & CEO of Ledger.