Ledger Blue: firmware and availability updates

UPDATE: Late June (first expected date of June 25th may be a bit delayed), a final batch of 10,000 Ledger Blue units will be sold on ledger.com at a price of 229 EUR (without tax). 

The Ledger Blue is a premium hardware wallet with an advanced user experience thanks to a large touch screen interface. It was first released in November 2016, a few months after the Nano S, and was an immediate success. We originally planned to offer the Blue to enterprise customers, but the Blue became popular with a wider audience, and we found it challenging to keep pace.

For some time we’ve had questions from our community – asking when updates to the Ledger Blue will be available. They are valid questions. With the huge success of the Nano S, which has sold more than a million units, most of our R&D bandwidth has been dedicated to that product.

Despite being a premium hardware wallet – the Blue received just one firmware update, as the Nano S received three. Rightly, many members of our community have been wondering about the future of the Ledger Blue, and asking us when we will build out new features through firmware updates. We’re sorry we kept you waiting so long.
 

Firmware update 2.1 availability for the Blue

The 2.1 firmware update for the Ledger Blue will be available on June 14th. This update will address security issues that were identified on the Nano S in the 1.4.2 firmware release, and will also add a number of features, including:

• Passphrase management
• New cryptographic libraries
• New cryptocurrency apps (similar to the Nano S)

The firmware update will be available on the Ledger Manager, and will require an update both to the Secure Element (SE) and Microcontroller (MCU). This update will also require a wipe of the seed, requiring you to have access to the 24 words backup. Bluetooth functionality will not be enabled on this firmware release.

We’d like to say thank you for our many Ledger Blue customers for their patience as we’ve worked on this update.
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The future of the Ledger Blue

Our original intent with the Ledger Blue was to create a device that was tailor made to the needs of enterprise customers. Many of you have rightly asked us why the Ledger Blue has not received the level of support enjoyed by the Nano S.

When we designed the Ledger Blue, we chose a sophisticated architecture for the device. This enabled the development of powerful UX features, but made large scale production challenging.

In future, the Ledger Blue will be a core part of our enterprise products and services. We will continue to build a powerful set of firmware and software tools around Ledger Blue hardware, with input from Ledger customers in financial institutions.

If you would like to own a Ledger Blue – you have a final chance to get one. We will be selling one final batch of the devices to our community in June.

Ledger will continue to support the Blue in the future, and all devices sold will have the normal warranty. New cryptocurrency applications will also be published for the Blue, and security firmware updates will be made available if necessary.
 

Final availability for community customers

Late June (first expected date of 25th may be a bit delayed), a final batch of 10,000 Ledger Blue units will be sold on ledger.com at a price of 229 EUR (without tax). It will not be available through other channels.

These new devices feature hardware updates, which address display and battery issues reported by owners of previous Ledger Blue batches. Every new device shipped will come with the 2.1 firmware update pre-installed.
Once they’re gone, they’re gone. This will be the last batch of Ledger Blue devices made widely available to our community. And there won’t be a successor to the Blue or a new product with an equivalent form factor.

Rest assured that our decision to limit Blue sales to enterprise customers does not indicate a shift away from the wider Ledger community. We are committed to building a family of products and services that will secure digital assets for people, enterprises and machines – and we’ll keep listening to this community as we build those products.