🚨Ledger CEO says Recover service expected to go live by end of year🚨
Ledger plans to roll out its private-key recovery service before year’s end after a first look at the product got a frosty reception from users in May.
The French crypto firm is also tangling with how to offer privacy-preserving tools and the ability to provide identifying information where needed.
Serving cypherpunks can be a thankless task. Ledger’s CEO Pascal Gauthier, a flash Frenchman with more rings than fingers, got a stark reminder of that earlier this year.
The Paris-based hardware wallet maker drew a sharp backlash in May over a service it hopes will help users recover their private keys by splitting seed phrases into three shards shared between Ledger and two other security companies, CoinCover and EscrowTech.
But for Ledger’s customers, many of whom fancy themselves self-sovereign, the product set off alarm bells. A significant concern was whether private keys could be reassembled and served up in the event of a government subpoena.
Privacy on-demand
Ledger Recover isn’t the only thorny privacy issue with which Gauthier must contend.
At a time when privacy coins — which grant crypto users more anonymity than, say, bitcoin — are being removed from major exchanges in Europe, Ledger remains committed to supporting them.
CoinDesk reported last year that the European Union was considering a ban preventing banks and licensed crypto firms from dealing in privacy coins. When Binance halted the trading of privacy coins in Belgium a few weeks ago, it said in a statement that it is “required to follow local laws and regulations regarding the trading of privacy coins.”
Yet, Ledger users can store Monero, a popular privacy coin with a market capitalization of $2.7 billion, on their devices. Gauthier said Ledger lobbied hard to ensure that the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) rules, which came into effect this year, wouldn’t capture self-custody — and succeeded.
