Ledger, a bad experience

A few days ago, Ledger announced it stopped giving support to the Nano S product, one of the oldest hardware wallets.

I have to say my relationship with Ledger had been bitter/sweet through the years, but with this weekend experience, it has became terrible.

I got my first Nano S, several years ago, quite soon after entering crypto space. The device was quite easy to use and convenient and the online The App to deal with it kept improving and I was happy with the product. Soon I realized the amount of space was too little and over the years decided to upgrade but since I bought my first one directly from Ledger my purchase data was among the info leaked when their online store was hacked back in December 2020

I didn't bother too much at the beginning but soon email phishing was coming into my account and I had to be careful. I checked some of the online services you can use to check if your data has been leaked and is in the dark web and of course my data was there.

Later on Ledger got a new funding round and soon after announced the "unpopular" password recovery service which was quite controversial coming from a "privacy company". By then I had already started thinking on purchasing a different device which I ended up doing over the years but I had suggested many friends to purchase a Ledger Nano S to keep their funds safe when they asked for advice.

Last weekend one of those friends came home requesting help to access the device as he has not done anything for years since he ever bought some crypto. Surprisingly the device screen brightness was very low and some pixels where missing. I could hardly introduce the pin but finally was able to and went through the process of updating firmware. Soon after it was imposible to see anything on the screen and the update had to be aborted. The device ended up being useless.

I asked him if he still had the 24 words, he did but had written them fast the first day I helped him set up the wallet and two or three words are hard to understand. We were not able to recover the wallet.

He did not have a lot money there and not everything might be lost as he can keep trying. I was using sparrow wallet to recover the wallet through the words and its final sum check helps to verify if the words are correct, but we still have not been able to recover it.

I can understand old tech gets deprecated but a device which had been used only once and the second time give you problems like this is not something you want to deal with. I stopped recommending using ledger to newcomers a few years ago, now, after this experience I will recommend those who did, to get a newer hardware open source device from a different provider and migrate their funds