Last week, hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger came under fire when it announced that it is possible to recover a wallet where you have lost your login details. For this you have to seed phrase send it to Ledger, who will then ensure that it is safely storedd. Much of the crypto community was not exactly happy about this. But for competitor Trezor the controversy came with an added benefit.
Sales of Trezor wallets increased enormously
That writes CryptoSlate, who has been in contact with Trezor. In a statement, Trezor CEO Matěj Žák wrote that sales of its hardware wallets have grown by 900% in one week. According to the chief executive cold storage must stand for ‘100% self-custody’. Trezor will therefore never make the seed phrase accessible to parties other than the owner of the wallet itself.
The company also says it has made all technical data completely open-source and that independent experts have examined the hardware and software. Extracting the seed phrase should therefore be impossible according to the manufacturer.
Ledger panics largely unnecessarily
After Ledger unveiled the new service, panic broke out as it became clear that it is even possible to extract the seed phrase from a hardware wallet. The community viewed this fact and Ledger’s new service as violating customer trust, some people even allegedly burned their Ledger Nano in protest.
Ledger argued that as a customer you should have some trust in the company anyway, and it promised it would never betray customer trust.
Nevertheless, we wrote yesterday that according to the crypto security company Unciphered, in principle no hardware wallet is completely secure. In a video, the company explained how to extract the seed phrase of a hardware wallet from the device. Here you must have physical access to the device, and hacking is not easy. Ironically, the wallet in question was a Trezor Model T, although Unciphered says any wallet imaginable can be hacked.