Pascal Gauthier, the CEO of Ledger, has written an open letter about the recent news of Ledger Recover and how customers were told about it. In the letter, Gauthier said that the company’s miscommunication had caused worry in the crypto community and made it hard for customers to understand how the product fit into Ledger’s plans for the future.
The company that makes hardware wallets recently revealed that its new service, called Ledger Recover, is now available. This service is meant to give users an extra layer of security by letting them store encrypted backups of their seed phrases with three custodians.
A know-your-customer (KYC) check will be needed for the opt-in option. But some people in the crypto community don’t like this move because they don’t want to share seed words with anyone but the wallet owner.
These worries have made people wonder if this new feature is safe, and Ledger has since apologized for any confusion that the launch may have caused.
Even though this service isn’t new, the way the company told people about it was confusing. In its open letter, Gauthier admitted this and apologized for how it was communicated, saying that they never meant to surprise customers.
Gauthier said that their goal is to make crypto safe and easy to use. He said again that the biggest problem with crypto self-custody is recovering the seed phrase, and that Ledger Recover is a service that is needed to solve this problem. He also talked about how important it is to have self-sovereignty and self-custody over digital assets, which is what crypto is all about.
Gauthier also said that Ledger never gives up on security and that their Donjon security team is committed to reviewing not only Ledger’s firmware and hardware updates, but also the whole environment.
Ledger puts the launch of the Recover service on hold.
Ledger is also committed to making things more transparent, in addition to making sure they are safe. Most of Ledger’s code is already open source, and the company wants to speed up its plan to open source more of its code. Gauthier says that they will include as much of the company’s operating system as they can. They will start with core parts of the open source and Ledger Recover, which won’t be shared until this work is done.
Also, the company’s CTO, Charles Guillemet, said that open sourcing has always been a key part of the company’s roadmap and that recent events have only made it more important to speed up this effort. Some people in the cryptocurrency community have raised concerns about the safety and security of the company’s goods. By making the cryptographic protocols auditable, the company hopes to address those concerns.
The first step in this process will be to share the whitepaper for Ledger Recover. This will make it possible to check the cryptographic protocols used in the firmware. After this, the Recover product will come out once the latest firmware is made published.
Also, Guillemet says that delaying the start of the Recover program is a necessary step to put security and transparency first. The company will put the product on the market when the firmware part of the code is published. On the other hand, the other parts will take longer because they need to be refactored to separate the NDA-protected chip-specific features from the company’s open code.
