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- Ledger has unveiled an consistently-offline “Recovery Key” orderly card for its Flex and Stax hardware wallets
- The company has replaced cloud-essentially based shard storage with a PIN-safe, NFC-enabled card that never leaves the user’s possession
- The Recovery Key has sparked debate about balancing self-custody with convenient restoration
Ledger has launched a contemporary offline restoration key that replaces cloud backups with a PIN-safe orderly card, offering users a more stable and convenient technique to recover their wallets. The card communicates with Ledger devices by encrypted NFC and retail outlets the master secret entirely offline, doing away with the necessity for identification tests or internet entry. The start marks a shift according to criticism of Ledger’s outdated shard-essentially based restoration carrier, aiming to balance usability with self-custody, and while the manufacture has been successfully received by many security researchers, some consultants warning that even local backups introduce doable vulnerabilities.
Born From Ledger Rating better Catastrophe
In quite loads of techniques, we are in a position to hint the trend of the Recovery Key to Ledger’s disastrous 2023 start of its cloud-essentially based Ledger Rating better carrier, which drew fire for fragmenting seed phrases on remote servers within the aid of a KYC wall. This precipitated the company to promise transparency, and the Recovery Key is its acknowledge: a physical card that retail outlets the master secret inside of the an identical tamper-resistant Genuine Element learned in its wallets and is entirely launch-sourced and audited by security company Synacktiv.
The Recovery Key works by tapping the cardboard and entering a secondary PIN on the pockets’s touchscreen, which straight rebuilds the 24-note seed with out ever touching the internet. Since the secret never leaves the cardboard, no non-public info or identification job is required, and owners can manufacture a number of spare keys for redundancy. Charles Guillemet, Ledger’s chief abilities officer, talked up the trend:
We’ve received extraordinarily certain recommendations from security researchers and industry leaders, and we’re enraged to demonstrate it to the field for some distance more recommendations forward of its start soon.
Guillemet printed the principle aspects of the Recovery Key in an X thread:
🚨I’m enraged to boom a mountainous technical milestone in @Ledger’s mission to simplify self-custody.
Ledger Recovery Key—a PIN-safe physical card enabling storage & restoration of your 24 words with appropriate just a few faucets.
No KYC, no subscription price, appropriate peace of recommendations: 👇🧵 pic.twitter.com/rqy2XcPeFJ
— Charles Guillemet (@P3b7_) June 24, 2025
No longer Each person is Convinced
Every time Ledger brings out products love this, it’s seeking to string a needle: preserve hardcore self-custody purists onside while offering inexperienced persons a restoration course that’s convenient but stable. Ian Rogers, the company’s chief abilities officer, framed the product as a usability step forward, announcing, “With Ledger Recovery Key we are making stable self-custody easy-to-use for all people… we are proud to present a restoration resolution for every class of user.”
No longer each person appears to be glad, nevertheless:
I composed acquire this upsetting, what happens if it breaks or wipes.
— LiτBro (@bittybitbit86) June 24, 2025
Sounds love any other course to milk
— jpgflippa (@jpgflippa) June 24, 2025
For shoppers who possess watched billion-dollar hacks and replace failures, the Recovery Key could presumably maybe maybe manufacture hardware wallets much less intimidating, but it also shifts responsibility aid onto folks to supply protection to a physical card. Ledger says the tool, which is handiest on hand for Flex and Stax devices, is optional and could presumably maybe simply composed coexist with every the primitive 24-note seed and the composed-on hand Ledger Rating better carrier.
