Hardware wallet company Ledger has delayed the release of Ledger Recover after a week of intense criticism from the crypto community.
In a Twitter Space joined by more than 13,000 users on May 23, Ledger chairman and CEO Pascal Gauthier said it was a "humbling experience" and a hard lesson in communication:
"It was a very humbling experience. We miscommunicated when we launched the product; we had no intention of surprising people. So, because of that, we understand where the community is going and apologize for the miscommunication." Gauthier revealed that in response to concerns, the company will accelerate its plans to open source more of its codebase. It will start with the core components of its operating system and Ledger Recover, he said: "It will not be released until this work is completed."
Ledger's CTO Charles Guillemet said that in the coming days, a white paper on the Recover Protocol will be open-sourced, along with a technical blog post to “explain how Recover works” and explain in more detail how the process works. "It will be very easy and clear for every cryptography and security expert to look at the protocol for more guarantees and understand how it works." Guillemet noted that this would also allow developers to build their own backup providers for seed phrase shards instead of using the one provided by Ledger.
“This has always been important to Ledger, but recent events have shown how important it is to the community, which is why we decided to prioritize this open-source process,” he added. Ledger recently told Cointelegraph that it will “continue to open source more and more code until we reach a level similar to the Raspberry Pi.” Ledger found itself in a public relations nightmare after revealing plans to launch a key recovery tool called Ledger Recover on May 16. A firmware update will allow users who have lost their private seed phrase to retrieve it via an optional feature. The company faced backlash from some members of the encryption community, who argued that it would add a "backdoor" to remove a user's private key from the device.
