Ledger is the most widely owned hardware wallet in the world and the most argued about. Both facts are earned. This page exists partly because we earn a commission on it - that is disclosed above and it is why the drawbacks are stated in full rather than softened.
What it is
A small USB device that holds your private keys in a certified secure element and signs transactions without the keys ever reaching your computer. Two current models matter:
| Nano S Plus | Nano X | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ~€79 | ~€149 |
| Bluetooth | No | Yes |
| Battery | No | Yes |
| Screen | Small, adequate | Small, adequate |
| Apps installed at once | ~100 | ~100 |
Buy the S Plus unless you specifically need to sign from a phone. Bluetooth and a battery are the entire difference, and both add attack surface and a component that degrades. Most people sign from a laptop at a desk. The extra €70 buys a convenience you will use twice.
There are also the Stax and Flex, which are larger, prettier, and considerably more expensive. They do nothing a Nano does not.
What it genuinely does well
The secure element is real. Ledger uses a bank-card-grade chip (CC EAL5+) rather than a general-purpose microcontroller. Extracting a key from one physically is beyond almost every realistic attacker. Several competitors use ordinary chips and defend the choice on openness grounds; that is a real trade, and Ledger's side of it is not the weak side.
Build quality and longevity. The devices survive being carried around. Firmware updates have been supported on hardware many years old.
Ledger Live is unusually good. Portfolio view, coin support, staking and swap built in. If you hold things other than bitcoin, the alternative is juggling several wallet apps.
Support for nearly everything. 5,000+ assets. If your holdings are not bitcoin-only, this is often the deciding factor.
The three things people bring up
None of these involve anyone's coins being taken off a device. The secure element has never been broken, and no Ledger user has lost bitcoin because the hardware failed to do its job.
The 2020 customer-data leak. Ledger's e-commerce database was breached and around 270,000 customers' names, phone numbers and home addresses were exposed. No keys, no funds - the devices were never touched - but owners have had convincing phishing ever since. One practical consequence worth acting on: ship to a work address or a pickup point rather than your home, and treat any email or letter claiming to be from Ledger as fake. That advice applies to every hardware wallet vendor; Ledger is just the one with a proven list in circulation.
Closed-source firmware. The secure element's firmware is proprietary, because the chip maker's terms require it. You cannot independently audit it. That is a real trade - a certified bank-grade chip you can't inspect, versus an open chip with weaker physical security - and reasonable people land on both sides. After a decade with an enormous bounty on breaking it, no backdoor has surfaced.
Ledger Recover. An opt-in seed-recovery service announced in 2023 that a lot of people disliked. It is opt-in, it needs physical confirmation on the device, and not subscribing means nothing happens. If you want it, it solves a real problem; if you don't, ignore it.
If verifiability matters most to you, buy a Trezor Safe or a Blockstream Jade instead. Both are open source, both are excellent, and we earn nothing from either. We would rather you owned the right wallet than the one that pays us.
When to buy something else
- You want open source end to end → Trezor Safe 5, or Blockstream Jade.
- Bitcoin only, maximum paranoia → Coldcard, with an air-gapped SD card workflow.
- You want to spend as little as possible → Jade, at roughly half the price.
- You hold under a few hundred pounds of bitcoin → a reputable phone wallet is fine. A hardware wallet is not free, and a €79 device guarding €150 is not the best use of the money.
If you do buy one
Direct from Ledger only. Never a marketplace listing, never secondhand. Supply-chain tampering is the realistic attack on a hardware wallet and it is defeated entirely by buying from source.
A device that arrives with a seed phrase already written on a card is a scam. Without exception. You generate the seed yourself, on the device, on first setup.
Then read the cold storage guide - particularly the part about testing your backup by wiping and restoring before you put real money on it. The device is the easy half. The backup is what actually loses people's coins.
Buy direct from Ledger · if you do not own any bitcoin yet, compare the exchanges first.
Our interest, stated plainly
We run a timelock service. We benefit if you hold bitcoin long term, and a hardware wallet makes that more likely - as does the commission at the top of this page. We do not benefit from you buying a device you do not need, or the wrong one, or from you trusting us more than the evidence warrants. That last point is the same one we make about our own product, which you also probably do not need.