Ledger review: what a Ledger protects, and what went wrong

Five signers and one app

Ledger SAS, based in Paris, calls its hardware wallets signers. The device never holds your coins, which stay on their blockchains; it holds the keys and signs transactions once you approve them.

All five pair with Ledger Wallet, the free desktop and mobile app that replaced Ledger Live in October 2025. It comes in eleven languages, but Dutch is not one of them.

How Ledger protects your keys

The keys are generated and stored on a secure element, a chip built to resist being read out or tampered with. Because approval happens on the device, malware on your laptop can propose a transaction but cannot confirm one.

The app is open source under the MIT licence, as are the coin apps on the device. The lowest layer, which talks directly to the STMicroelectronics chip, stays closed; Ledger says its agreement with the chipmaker prevents publication and that an outside lab audits each OS release instead.

A record of incidents

• 2020, customer data. Ledger's e-commerce and marketing database was stolen and, in December, published on a forum: over a million email addresses, plus names, postal addresses and phone numbers for roughly 272,000 customers. No funds or devices were touched, yet the leak still feeds phishing letters, texts and emails.
• 2023, Ledger Recover. Plans to store an encrypted copy of the recovery phrase with outside firms drew a backlash from users who expected keys never to leave the device. Ledger paused the launch and later released Recover as a paid, opt-in subscription.
• 2023, Connect Kit. A phished former employee's npm account was used to poison the library that websites use to talk to Ledger devices. People who approved the fake transactions lost around $600,000, which Ledger pledged to repay; the devices were not breached.
• 2026, CryptoBilis (ongoing). Ledger is investigating drained wallets of buyers from CryptoBilis, an authorised reseller in South-East Asia, and on 10 October confirmed an unauthorised hardware implant in one victim's device. It reports no sign that its own systems were compromised and has not confirmed the loss figures in the press. Recent CryptoBilis buyers are told to move funds to a new device with a fresh recovery phrase.

Costs and coins

Beyond the one-off price of the device you pay network fees, plus a monthly fee if you choose Recover. Ledger's shop loads prices only in the browser, so we could not verify them for any country; Ledger launched the Nano Gen5 at $179.

According to Ledger, every coin with its own page on this site works in Ledger Wallet without a third-party app, from bitcoin and Cardano to Sui and Hedera. Chainlink and Uniswap are ERC-20 tokens, so they sit under your Ethereum account, which needs a little ETH for gas. HYPE shows up only on HyperEVM; a balance on HyperCore, the trading layer of Hyperliquid, reads as zero.

The Buy screen hands the purchase to a separate provider such as MoonPay, Transak or Revolut, which sets the fee and checks your identity; Ledger says it charges nothing itself. Our comparison covers the other route: buying on a MiCA-licensed exchange and withdrawing to the device.

Withdrawing from a European exchange

Open Receive in Ledger Wallet, let the device display the address and check every character against what you paste into the exchange. Matching only the first and last characters, Ledger warns, is exactly what address-poisoning scams rely on.

The EU travel rule means the exchange will want proof that the address is yours, sometimes on small amounts too. Bitvavo names Ledger among the wallets you can connect to sign a message; Bitpanda's hardware-wallet option redirects you to the app, ideally on a desktop. Kraken accepts a signature from EVM wallets, a small Satoshi test or a self-declaration. Signing moves no funds.

Moving coins to a Ledger does not hide them from the tax office. Under DAC8, an EU-licensed platform reports the total value you sent to self-hosted addresses, per crypto-asset, to the authority in your country of residence.

Habits that matter with a Ledger

• Keep the recovery phrase on paper or metal and never type it anywhere else. Ledger does not call, text or message customers to ask for it.
• Install Ledger Wallet from ledger.com rather than through a search result or an advert, and ignore unexpected parcels claiming to be replacement devices.
• A genuine device never arrives with a phrase or PIN already set. Ledger's Genuine Check verifies the chip, but by Ledger's own account it cannot spot physical changes to the hardware.

Comparing brands? See our Trezor review or the overview of crypto wallets.