Ledger Fresh

Why Ledger Fresh?

Ledger Fresh (internal name) is Ledger’s Innovation Lab latest project. It is a flexible platform that aims to redefine and improve how users interact with their wallets.

Ledger Fresh leverages hardware wallets’s uncompromising security while delegating other safety checks that can run without any interaction to improve your experience.

With Ledger Fresh users will be able to interact with decentralized applications more seamlessly without needing to approve all transactions on their hardware device and without compromising on the security.

New users will also be able to immediately enter the Ledger ecosystem without a device or an application, just a smartphone, and gradually increase their security as their usage grows.

How Ledger Plans To Improve Your Ledger Experience

Ledger is built on world-class security. Smartcards are historic security technologies that we augmented to make them suitable for the Internet era in three ways:

• By removing the need to have a card reader to use a smartcard - it can now be directly connected to the USB port of a computer or used over Bluetooth.
• By providing an open Operating System, BOLOS (Blockchain Open Ledger Operating System), letting developers load their own native code into the device and users pick applications from a thriving ecosystem.
• By adding a screen and buttons connected directly to the smartcard to prevent malware from changing the information displayed to the user or faking user consent, thus making sure that What You See Is What You Sign.

While security will remain our North Star, we collected usage feedback about Ledger devices and found a few pain points.

1. Onboarding your Ledger Nano devices requires writing down a list of 12/24 words (the mnemonic) to backup the private cryptographic keys. This backup is critical to recover the assets if the device is lost and for interoperability with multiple wallets. As those words hold too much power and a high value, attackers are getting more and more creative to trick users into giving them.
2. When using a Ledger device, the user always performs the same actions regardless of the amount of the transaction. This can lead to fatigue and a lack of attention to details for more important transactions.
3. As users spend more time using cryptocurrencies, they might want to move to different governance solutions (such as multi-signature) or plan for inheritance - this is complex and costly with current solutions as this requires moving all assets to a new wallet.

A Smarter Wallet To Improve Your Experience

Those pain points could be solved by using a smarter wallet that can run its own independent logic, and let users freely customize part of this logic. Here are a few scenarios on how the different pain points we’ve just examined could be addressed.

1. The onboarding phase would let users register different devices to the smart wallet, and the recovery phrase would only be used once if all devices are lost, after giving notifications on all possible media and a grace period to cancel the operation to the user.
2. Different security profiles could be set in the smart wallet, ones for daily use cases and others for special/dedicated use cases. This could be done through allowlists or more complex policies linked to sources of truth operated offchain by the user.
3. The smart wallet logic would be updatable/upgradable on the fly, without having to move assets to a new wallet implementing new features.