While there has been a legitimate fallout over the controversial decision of Ledger to allow private keys to be recovered from the devices, GridPlus, a cold storage competitor, has already announced plans of moving to open source the firmware of the crypto wallets under it.
The company took to Twitter on 17th May to inform 17,500 followers that it would immediately open source the firmware of all the crypto devices in the third quarter of 2023, in what could be an effort for greater transparency in its operations. In a follow-up statement, the company wrote that the hardware wallet discussions for the week also laid bare the trust assumptions that had previously been taken for granted.
GridPlus Has Benefited Heavily From Ledger’s Controversial Move
A large part of the ire directed at Ledger by GridPlus stems from an update to the former’s firmware- which is a term for software that was built into the hardware device. This would allow the potential extraction of the private key of a user from their cold storage device, despite reports that have assured the users of the very opposite in the past.
Interestingly, Ledger is also a closed source- which means that only the developers from the company would be able to view this code and then inspect it for flaws. Open source code, as it stands, allows any programmer to access and then inspect all of the pre-existing code to improve it, and then check for errors that could have cropped up.
While the announcement by Ledger did subvert the understanding of the user of the kind of privacy features that were offered. Incidentally, some have also suggested that the outrage was completely blown way out of proportion. Competitors have also capitalized on the poorly received announcement of Ledger, like GridPlus.
