Wallet maker Ledger’s ‘Recover’ option is now live, prompting a fresh round of criticism from some unimpressed crypto users.
When the service was first publicly discussed a few months ago, some people said the product undermined Ledger’s stated commitment to privacy and security.
Recover, which provides a backup for users’ recovery seed phrases, is now available on Ledger’s most popular wallet, Nano X, CEO Pascal Gauthier wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday.
Seed phrases are a random string of 12 or 24 words that a user needs to remember in order to regain access to a crypto wallet, meaning that if the user forgets these words or loses the written record of them, the digital assets inside would be unrecoverable.
Crypto wallet providers therefore offer various means of backing up seed phrases, but Ledger’s proved controversial when it was first announced in May. Recovery involves encrypting users’ private keys, duplicating them and splitting them into three pieces, which are held by three different parties: Ledger, crypto-security firm Coincover and an independent backup service provider.
Gauthier’s announcement of this optional, paid-for service was met with a fresh round of snark this week from X users, who repeated claims that Ledger was asking customers to pay to make their private key more vulnerable.
However, Ledger’s CEO has maintained that this service is in response to demand from users who want to know that their crypto holdings are not at the mercy of their ability to remember a random string of words.
“Let’s be clear: too many people have lost their digital assets because they lost their Secret Recovery Phrase,” he wrote on X. “This risk discourages people from using crypto, and certainly from using self-custody.”
