The Ledger hardware wallet is the best wallet on the market. The brand became iconic and the level of security is maximum. In this article, I will present the different wallets of the brand, explain how to use them but also compare them to the other wallets on the market. Finally, I’ll be sharing some scripts to customize it and provide the full cold wallet experience.
1. What is Ledger?
Ledger provides security and infrastructure solutions to critical digital assets for consumers and institutional investors.
In other words: they build, sell and ship hardware wallets globally that you can purchase here.
Ledger has 2 models, the first one is nano-x (the most advanced) the second one is nano-s (the cheapest) with different
characteristics:
If you don’t know how to decide between the two, I have the video for you.
It basically analyzes the pros and cons of paying more for the extra features (like the Bluetooth connection and the number of apps installed):
2. How To Use A Ledger Wallet?
First of all, if you’ve ordered one of the Ledger wallets, you need to install it. This is a walkthrough of the steps from first naming your device to setting up a pin and finally moving assets to your wallet:
What is great with Ledger is that there is an application that you can use on your phone to monitor your assets:
The only important thing you need to remember is to keep your secret key safe. No digital copy. No sharing online.
Another good idea with Ledger for Cardano hodlers is to stake your ADA off the exchanges.
3. The solidity of the company
The first thing I’ve looked at before buying a Ledger to secure my funds was the reliability of the company.
The venture is headquartered in Paris with a very impressive list of investors:
Yes, half a billion of funds secured. That’s big enough for me. The size of the company (500-1000 people) is also a green light. The names of the founders are well known in the space:
What I also like is that the company is old enough: it has experienced a lot of bull and bear markets. Another thing that I always look at as a developer is the activity on Github. Their non-sensitive repositories are shared and extremely active which is a sign of good health for a product.
All the commits are from less than 24 hours ago:
When developers commit a lot on Github, it means different things. First of all, that there ARE developers. But not only. It also tells you that the company is alive, implementing features or fixing bugs. In short, it means that they are improving things or working on issues leading to a better product in the future. This might look like a detail to a lot of people but not to me. I consider this as a very positive point when choosing a wallet, knowing that I will store my assets in a place that is continually being worked on.
4. Comparison with other wallets
When I bought my first hardware wallet, I spent a lot of time comparing and I think it’s a good thing. A comparison I like is the one from Coinbureau. But I also appreciate a visual comparison like this one, showing that Ledger is maybe the best price-quality trade-off:
That was a very “hardware” comparison but you can also find more general ones:
Best overall rating… And with a mobile app included!
5. Custom Scripts
Yes, you can personalize your Ledger hardware wallet with scripts using their libraries. For example, display things on the screen or re-implement cryptographic primitives (for the geeks out there ;-)).
Here is a good sample of snippets to get you started:
To display “The Ledger Of The Oracle” all you need is to update this .c file with:
{
{BAGL_LABEL, 0x00, 20, 0, 320, 60, 0, 0, BAGL_FILL, 0xFFFFFF, 0x1d2028,
BAGL_FONT_OPEN_SANS_LIGHT_14px | BAGL_FONT_ALIGNMENT_MIDDLE, 0},
"The Ledger Of The Oracle",
0,
0,
0,
NULL,
NULL,
NULL,
}But you could go way further and implement a game (you nerd!) or anything you like on it that involves code.
I will let you imagine the doors it can open for you to customize your precious.
Thanks for reading.
Disclaimer: this is not financial advice
