Pascal Gauthier, CEO of Ledger, has apologized for the company’s “miscommunication” and said that the previous week has been a “humbling experience.”
Following a week of heavy criticism from the cryptocurrency community, hardware wallet provider Ledger made the choice to postpone the release of Ledger Recover.
Ledger chairman and CEO Pascal Gauthier stated in a May 23 Twitter Spaces that it has been a “humbling experience” and a difficult communication lesson:
“It has been a very humbling experience. The launch of this product was miscommunicated; we didn’t mean to take people by surprise. We apologize for the miscommunication and understand the community’s direction as a result.
Gauthier disclosed that the company would be stepping up its preparations to open-source more of its codebase in response to worries. The operating system’s foundational elements and Ledger Recover will be the first to be implemented, according to him, and they “won’t be released until this work is complete.”
“Every single cryptography and security expert will find it very simple and easy to look at the protocol to get more assurances and understand how it works,”
In addition, developers would be able to create their own backup provider for the seed phrase shards rather than relying on the one Ledger offers, according to Guillemet.
“This has always been something important for Ledger, but this recent event showed how important it is for the community, and this is why we decided to prioritize this open-sourcing process,” the executive continued.
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.
A thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Dv0jBCM4Ys
— Charles Guillemet (@P3b7_) May 23, 2023
In a recent interview, Ledger stated that it would “continue to open source increasingly more of our code until we reach a similar level as the Raspberry Pi.”
After announcing intentions to launch a crucial recovery tool called Ledger Recover on May 16, Ledger found itself in a public relations disaster. Users who lost their private seed phrase would be able to recover it using the firmware update’s optional feature.
I want to address the feedback over 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
Some members of the cryptocurrency community criticized the company because they thought that doing this would offer a “backdoor” allowing a user’s private keys to be removed from the device.