Ah... Crypto-Twitter and influencers! Always fast to jump on to the end of the world narratives before stepping back to think. I guess that is the nature of aiming for link clinks and engagement farming. Okay, that said, Ledger probably should have had better communication about the roll out of their "Recovery" product.

Now, as far as I understand, Ledger did have a communication and education timeline in mind, but shipped the firmware for their hardware wallets ahead of the education. That mean that the change logs noted the Recovery product and that spooked a lot of people who were not quite sure how hardware wallets worked on the inside.

So, Ledger Recovery is the backup method that is being shipped for those who are not confident holding the single copy of their master seeds. It seems like it is an implementation of Shamir's Secret Sharing with three parties, something that is quite useful that Trezor has implemented a long time ago. However, in the case of Ledger, it appears that one of the parties is a KYC company that will release their shard upon successful identification. That is the part that I'm less keen on...

Anyway, crypto-Twitter lost it when they thought that the secure enclave were the master seed was stored was being altered and accessed by the firmware that allowed the implementation of Recovery. This was a misunderstanding of how the enclave worked and is something that is common to all hardware wallets. Anyway, I saw the barrage of FUD, and started to worry a bit, but then a day later cooler heads prevailed and I saw more reasoned explanations about the implementations and details about how hardware wallets worked on a technical level.

I think a lot of the furor was with hardcore crypto people thinking that hardware wallets were a completely trustless way to hold master seeds and interact with blockchains. However, in reality, there was always going to be a chain of trust at some point... and in this case, the trust is with Ledger issuing firmware updates.

Now, it is impossible to do anything trustlessly... you will have to trust code, or compilers, or hardware. Unless you are able to securely perform all these things yourself (spoiler, no-one can...) then you will have to offload trust onto someone else at some point.

Ledger wallets are still one of the better solutions, that in my mind are a good balance of self-custody and trust.

Recovery is an opt-in subscription anyway... so, you don't have to use it. The threat model is unchanged, you still have to trust Ledger for their firmware updates anyway. But I think that a lot of people thought that they were out in the wilderness without any reliance on anyone else... the wild frontiersman... but in fact, they still needed a supply chain to keep them alive! It was just that they didn't see it... and now they do.

So, no need to worry... I prefer to still use a Ledger instead of software wallets! And I certainly can't build my own tools!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
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Publish0x

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