After yesterday’s controversial update, competitors are capitalizing on Ledger's terrible, horrible, no-good-very-bad day by attempting to court its disillusioned customers with discounted prices on their offerings.
In a stroke of rapid strategic marketing, four of Ledger’s main rivals were quick to respond to the community’s pushback to the update, and slashed prices on their products.
Blockstream is offering a 10% discount on its flagship wallet Jade, Trezor is offering a 15% discount, Cold Card is showcasing a 15% discount, and BitBox has marked down their wallets by 10%.
The companies have also been touting their open-source code and refusal to entertain any compromise of self-custody.
The main source of ire from the crypto community towards Ledger was due to the Tuesday introduction of Ledger Recover, an opt-in ID-based private key recovery service that allows users to back up their seed phrases to their personal identity via three different custodians.
Across Crypto Twitter yesterday and today, users were so disgusted with the company, some went so far as to burn and break their Ledger devices.
Jameson Lopp, CTO of Casa and renowned cybersecurity expert, told Decrypt yesterday that the main source of risk with Ledger’s update is “due to the closed source nature of its firmware.”
Echoing and building upon this sentiment was Seth For Privacy, the pseudonymous head of content for Foundation Devices, who emphasized on Twitter that the new feature “means you have to connect your identity to your Ledger account, giving yet another KYC pain-point for data leaks, hacks, and government censorship or surveillance.”
Whether Ledger Recover will prove to be the company’s biggest flop or best move at grabbing market share among those not comfortable with personal private-key management is anyone’s guess—but its rivals are banking on a flop.