Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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Ledger has paused its recovery service following backlash it received from its users.
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Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier apologized for the company’s miscommunication and said it was a humbling experience.
Ledger Pauses Its Recovery Service
Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has announced that it has halted the launch of Ledger Recover. This latest development comes after the company faced backlash from the cryptocurrency community.
According to the Ledger CEO, Pascal Gauthier, the entire experience has been a humbling one for the company and a hard lesson in communication. He stated that;
“But our unintentional communication mistake took everyone by surprise and affected our customer’s ability to accurately understand Ledger Recover, its role in the growing crypto community, and for Ledger’s future offering. We apologize 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.”
Furthermore, Gauthier added that Ledger would be accelerating its plans to open-source more of its codebase. The CEO revealed that the company would start with the core components of its operating system and Ledger Recover. He explained that Ledger Recover will not be released until the work is complete. He stated that;
“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.”
Gauthier added that making Ledger open source is to boost the company’s transparency.
Charles Guillemet, the chief technology officer of Ledger, pointed out that in the coming days, a white paper on the Recover Protocol would become open source. This will be followed by technical blog posts explaining the principles of Recover and how the process works. The CTO added that;
“It's going to be very easy and clear for every single cryptography and security expert to have a look at the protocol to get more guarantees and understand how it works.”
Ledger faced backlash from the crypto community when it introduced the Ledger Recover service a few days ago. The company’s Recover service hasn’t had the intended positive effect as users believe that it undermines Ledger’s brief of privacy and security. The service, which is optional, allows users to back up their seed recovery phrase by encrypting it in fragments with third parties.
