Ledger CEO explains the company’s path to regain user trust

In a recent blog post, Pascal Gauthier, Chairman and CEO of Ledger, addressed concerns over the company’s new product, Ledger Recover.

The announcement of this product, provided by Coincover, was met with confusion and surprise, prompting Gauthier to clarify its purpose and the company’s future plans.

Ledger Recover is a service designed to help recover lost seed phrases. Seed phrases are crucial for crypto self-custody, as they allow users to recover their private keys, which govern their digital assets. However, many users either don’t own their private keys or put them at risk by using less secure forms of self-custody such as software wallets and storing their seed phrases in insecure ways that lead to loss or unauthorized third parties obtaining access to funds.

The blog post reiterates that Ledger’s mission is to make crypto secure and easy to use, and Ledger Recover is a part of that mission. The company purportedly believes in the need for a service like Ledger Recover.

Gauthier acknowledged that the announcement of Ledger Recover was not communicated effectively, leading to confusion and surprise among customers. He apologized for this and assured that the company has learned from this experience and will improve future communications.

Ledger’s commitment to security is unwavering. The company highlights that it has nearly a decade of experience in securing private keys and has been recognized for its efforts, with its hardware wallet purportedly being the only one certified by Consumer Reports. Ledger’s Donjon security team is dedicated to reviewing not only Ledger’s firmware and hardware updates but also those of the entire ecosystem.

In addition to security, Ledger claims to value transparency. Ledger’s highlighted that most of its codebase is open source, allowing developers and security experts to review the code. This transparency extends to Ledger Recover, which will not be released until the open sourcing of as much of the Ledger operating system as possible is complete.

Ledger plans to accelerate its open sourcing roadmap, starting with the core components of the operating system and Ledger Recover. The company will also open source the Ledger Recover protocol, giving the community more choice over their self-custody. This move is part of Ledger’s commitment to bringing security and self-custody to the next wave of crypto users.

The company is seemingly attempting to regain user trust after enabling users to export the recovery phrase for their recovery service (with on-device confirmation) with a firmware update after having assured its users that their private keys will never leaver the devices.

The firmware update surprised much of the community, as many users previously believed that extracting the private key from the device would have been impossible.