Electronic wallet company Ledger postpones the release of Ledger Recover after an intense week of criticism from the cryptocurrency community.
In a May 23 Twitter Spaces joined by more than 13,000 users, Ledger President and CEO Pascal Gauthier said it has been a “humbling experience” and a tough lesson in communication:
“This experience has been humbling. We miscommunicated the launch of this product, we didn’t mean to take people by surprise. So we understand the direction of the community and apologize for the miscommunication.”
Gauthier revealed that, in response to concerns, the firm will accelerate its plans to open up more of its codebase, starting with the core components of its operating system and Ledger Recover, which it stated “will not be released until this work is complete.”
Charles Guillemet, Ledger CTO said that in the coming days, a Recover Protocol white paper will be open sourced along with technical blog posts to “explain the principles of Recover” and more detailed explanations of how the process works.
“It’s going to be very easy and clear for any and all cryptography and security experts to take a look at the protocol for further assurance and to understand how it works.”
Guillemet noted that this would also allow developers to build their own backup provider for seed phrase snippets instead of using the one offered by Ledger.
“This has always been important to Ledger, but this recent event showed how important it is to the community and that’s why we decided to prioritize this open-sourcing process,” added.
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.
To thread pic.twitter.com/Dv0jBCM4Ys
—Charles Guillemet (@P3b7_) May 23, 2023
Ledger recently told Cointelegraph that “it would continue to open up more and more of our code until we reached a level similar to that of the Raspberry Pi.”
Ledger found himself in a public relations nightmare after revealing plans on May 16 to introduce a key recovery tool called Ledger Recover. The firmware update would allow users who lose their private seed phrase to recover it through an optional feature.
I want to address the feedback about Ledger Recover, the way it was communicated, and share our path forward. Read my letter and join our town hall with our leadership team to learn more.
https://t.co/2hlPrMwzaN pic.twitter.com/juVBOpWeeG
— Pascal Gauthier @Ledger (@_pgauthier) May 23, 2023
The company faced backlash from some community members, who believed this would add a “backdoor” to have a user’s private keys removed from the device.
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