A scandal in the cryptocurrency community has led to a 900% increase in the popularity of Trezor wallets

A scandal in the cryptocurrency community caused by statements by representatives of the hardware cryptocurrency wallet manufacturer Ledger has led to an increase in the popularity of wallets from a competitor, Trezor. In just one week, sales of Trezor cold wallets increased by 900%.

While Ledger said that the company has always had access to the keys to its customers' wallets, Trezor emphasized: «We believe that hardware wallets — cold storage that promises 100 percent self-service — should not provide access to the seed phrase to anyone but the owner.»

As it became known from the publication on Trezor’s official website, independent experts are constantly monitoring that third parties do not have the opportunity to extract the seed phrase or its fragment. The company calls its product an open source project.

As for Ledger, the company has positioned its wallets as a way to store assets autonomously. However, when it announced plans to launch a new tool for recovering lost keys, Ledger Recovery, Ledger set a precedent. After all, the service offered to split the seed phrase into three fragments, which would be stored in encrypted form by three different parties.

According to critics, the new tool would have reduced the security of the device, making it vulnerable to fraud. At present, the company has refused to launch Ledger Recovery, but the information that the company has access to private keys to wallets is still a concern for the community.

It is worth noting that the security of Trezor wallets is now also in question — Eric Michaud, a specialist at the cybersecurity startup Unciphered, said that he managed to hack the popular Trezor T hardware crypto wallet manufactured by Satoshi Labs. In the video, the specialist demonstrates how to extract the wallet’s seed phrase by exploiting a vulnerability related to physical access to the device.