Y’all Won’t Believe What This Ledger Gadget Is Up To Now

[CryptoButthead.com , msch , May 18, 2023] Well, gather ’round folks, I got a tale to tell, as twisty as a coiled rattler in a burlap sack. You see, Ledger, them big shots in the hardware wallet business, are stirring up a real hornet’s nest with their newfangled thingamabob, the Ledger Recover. It’s supposed to let folks get their seed phrase back – that’s the magic words that open up your crypto wallet – by proving who they are to Ledger.

This here service’s been rolled out in fancy places like the European Union, the UK, Canada, and our good ol’ US of A. To make it work, folks have to hand over their passport or ID card for checking. Seems simple enough, right?

But here’s where it gets more confusing than a hog in a henhouse. They take your seed phrase and chop it up into three pieces, kinda like a digital wishbone, I reckon. Then they send these parts to three different places – Coincover, Ledger, and some other mystery backup service. To get your phrase back, you gotta pass an ID check and two out of the three companies gotta send the pieces back to your Ledger gizmo. Once they’re all together again, your phrase is revealed.

But, not everyone’s as happy as a pig in mud with this plan. Some folks are fussing about risks like the companies joining forces against you, identity theft, and making a system that knows too much about you, just like a real bank.

This fella, Mudit Gupta, who’s some bigwig at Polygon, called it a “horrendous idea.” And another user, who knows who they are, compared it to making a bank account, only more complicated. Even Emin Gün Sirer, a big brain over at Ava Labs, didn’t much care for it.

And, let’s not forget about privacy. Some people don’t take too kindly to the idea of their private keys being exposed through Ledger’s API. Anton Bukov from 1inch and Changpeng Zhao from Binance are among those sounding the alarm bells.

Now, all this hoo-ha is only for folks with the Ledger’s Nano X thingy, but they’re planning to include the Nano S Plus and Stax in the future. They’re capping the number of tries folks can make to get their seed phrase back, though.

Despite all the fuss and feathers, Ledger’s top dogs stood their ground in a Twitter discussion. Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier, stood as proud as a rooster in a henhouse, claiming, “This is the way that the next hundreds of millions of people will actually onboard to crypto. I’m sorry, but the piece of paper is a thing of the past and Ledger Recover is a thing of the future.” Well, we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?