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Trezor Sales Spike 900% Even as Exploit of “T” Model is Revealed

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Sales of hardware wallet Trezor jumped after rival Ledger proposed a feature that has unnerved crypto holders.

Trezor sales soared 900% week-over-week after Ledger announced an opt-in feature called Recover, which gives the company access to users’ seed phrases. after

“The crypto community has spoken loudly and clearly on their insistence for uncompromised security of hardware wallets and this is echoed in an extraordinary bounce in our sales over the past week” Trezor CEO Matej Zak, said in a statement shared with The Defiant.

Security Concerns

Hardware wallets have been one of the hottest topics in crypto since Ledger originally released plans for Recover on May 16. That Trezor sales are bouncing shows that users are tapped into the concerns around security and are willing to spend in order to store their digital assets in what may be a more safe manner.

“The past week people learned that hardware wallets aren’t a trustless solution for their crypto assets,” the well-known pseudonymous analyst OKHotshot told The Defiant. The analyst said that in terms of security, hardware wallets still have benefits over hot wallets, which create secret keys in internet-connected environments. “Hardware wallets are still inherently more secure: the seed is still generated offline and signing still needs physical approval.”

Recover Uproar

Recover caused an uproar because it involved exporting users’ secret key, which controls access to a wallet’s funds, to three different parties as well as providing users’ identification to one of those parties. Many Ledger owners who had previously believed that it was impossible to export the secret key, awoke to the realization that the company behind their devices could push firmware to do so.

Trezor says it’s fully open source and has a bug bounty program, which means that security researchers can independently audit the company’s hardware wallet. Žák likened the audits to “peer review.”

Ledger is responding to the market’s pressure for increased transparency — Pascal Gauthier, the company’s CEO, released a statement on Ledger’s website which said that the company would open source the Recovery feature. The move is part of an overall acceleration of what Gauthier called the company’s “open-sourcing roadmap.”

Trezor T Exploit

To be sure, Trezor has had its own share of problems this week. Unciphered, a company which provides services to recover previously inaccessible digital assets, released a well-circulated video on how to access the secret key on Trezor T on May 24.

The Trezor T hit the market in 2018 and is the most recent hardware wallet released by the company.

Kraken, a crypto exchange, had already released a way to hack both the Trezor T, and Trezor One, in 2020.

And Trezor may not have any fundamental difference from Ledger — Éric Larchevêque, the former CEO and co-founder of Ledger, alleged on Reddit that, like for Ledger, firmware could be developed for Trezor which would result in exporting the secret key.

In a week when the crypto community is battering hardware wallets with the highest degree of scrutiny in recent memory, lesser-known players like GridPlus, NGRAVE, and Keystone, are all seizing the moment to promote their products on social media.

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