Ledger CEO says crypto key recovery service makes self-custody easier

Hardware crypto wallet firm Ledger has faced harsh criticism from the crypto community after announcing its “Recover” service, which is an optional paid feature that will eventually allow users to back up and restore their private seed phrase.

Due to concerns expressed about the security elements of Ledger Recover, the hardware wallet manufacturer decided to postpone the launch of its service. On May 23, Charles Guillemet, chief technology officer of Ledger, explained in a Twitter thread that Ledger will “accelerate our open-sourcing roadmap to bring more verifiability to everything we do.”

Ledger’s mission is, and will always be, to provide our users with the right tools to own their digital value securely.

We have decided to accelerate our open-sourcing roadmap to bring more verifiability to everything we do.

A thread pic.twitter.com/Dv0jBCM4Ys

— Charles Guillemet (@P3b7_) May 23, 2023

Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier told Cointelegraph that Ledger Recover would launch once the company can open-source the code behind the Recover protocol. He further stressed that the new service is optional:

“Right now, the overwhelming majority of crypto users hold their funds on exchanges or software wallets, which are not secure. However, many people find managing their 24 words daunting or too complex. Ledger Recover — which again is completely optional — is designed for those people to make secure self custody easier, while not compromising on security.”

According to Gauthier, the goal behind Ledger Recover is to onboard the next 100 million users to the crypto sector. Yet, to achieve this, he believes that “access to secure self-custody should be much easier.”

While this may be the case, the concept behind Ledger Recover has upset many of the company’s current users. Shahar Madar, head of security products at Fireblocks — an institutional digital asset custody platform — told Cointelegraph that Ledger Recover goes against the core ideals of Ledger’s customers:

“If it indeed allows a user to recover the full private key into a brand new device with just a form of identification, then technically, if the providers wanted to collude and initiate the process without the proper identification and authorization, they could.”

“In this case, the user is trusting the providers to follow the procedures, and there are inherent risks there,” he said.

Ledger Recover may be needed

Although Ledger Recover has created uproar in the crypto ecosystem,…