Ledger Delays Key Recovery Service, Accelerates Open-Source Roadmap

Hardware wallet Ledger has postponed the launch of its key recovery service, and apologized for the "unintentional communication mistake" regarding Ledger Recover, after facing criticism from the crypto community for several days.

Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier explained that the company made a "communication mistake" that prevented customers from understanding Ledger Recover "accurately."

"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," the CEO said in an open letter.

Ledger also announced it will not release Recover until open sourcing is available.

The hardware wallet decided to prioritize the release of the white paper of Ledger Recover and will provide options to its users to use their preferred shared backup providers, which will come under an open-source implementation Ledger's Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet said.

"We recently open-sourced our cryptography library (which is part of our OS), and we will publish the whitepaper of Ledger Recover very soon, allowing everyone to audit the cryptographic protocols and enable people to build their own shards backup provider," the executive tweeted.

"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," Gauthier noted.

"We'll start with open sourcing the white paper of Recover," Guillemet said on Tuesday on Twitter Spaces.

"It will also allow developers to build their own shard backup provider so you can use the Recover service as it's offered by Ledger, but if you want to build the backup on your own, this will be possible," he added.

Ledger became the center of an avalanche of vicious criticisms last week from the crypto community on various social media outlets after it announced Ledger Recover--a feature that enables users to keep encrypted versions of their seed phrases with three custodians.

At its launch, Ledger said the feature is just an "optional subscription for users who want a backup of their Secret Recovery Phrase," but would not be automatically enabled by any updates.

"The service was designed to be an "optional subscription for users who want a backup of their Secret Recovery Phrase. You don't have to use it, and can continue managing your recovery phrase yourself if that's why you bought a Ledger," Guillemet said.