This week has been alight with discussions of Ledger and their latest news. What is it? What does it mean? Should you continue to use Ledger devices? We get into it.
Token Gamer and NFT Insider have decided to combine forces to launch a weekly podcast, Mint One (formerly WAX Lyrical). John Nichols of NFT Insider and I will discuss a new topic every week, as well as feature special guests. If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, make sure you let us know through the Token Gamer Discord or Twitter, or the NFT Insider Discord or Twitter.
In last week’s episode, we let ChatGPT direct the podcast. This week, we get onto the newly spiky debate of hardware wallets.
Mint One Podcast, Episode 65: Are Ledger Devices Secure?
For the uninitiated, this week, Ledger announced their Recover service. Recover allows users to subscribe to an encrypted backup for your secret recovery phrase (those 24 words you needed to record and put somewhere safe.) This turns the hardware wallet from a self-custodial wallet to a semi-self-custodial, semi-non-custodial wallet. The objective of the new service is to attract future customers and keep the crypto safe of less tech-savvy and less organized holders.
If you’re not familiar with hardware wallets, this might seem like good business sense and a non-issue. Well, it’s complicated. Many believed that their secret recovery phrase was locked in a vault within their Ledger that no firmware update could touch, but they were wrong. In fact, that’d always been wrong, they just didn’t know it. I say they, but it’s as much “we” as it is “they”. In the course of this week, I have learned a lot about how hardware wallets function and how there is, for all intents and purposes, no such thing as trustless crypto storage.
In this episode, we discuss what Recover does and how it works, what some of the most common complaints about the firmware have been, and the ultimate question: Are Ledger devices secure?
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