Earlier last month, members of the Monero community were made aware of a bug within the Ledger Monero code that resulted in user’s funds not reflecting in their Ledger hardware wallets. The Monero core developers announced at the time on Reddit that the bug only affects Ledger Nano S hardware wallet specifically and that the funds were available only that they were appearing lost.
This week, the Monero team in collaboration with the Ledger team announced that the bug is now fixed and that affected users were helped by the Ledger team to recover their ‘lost’ funds. A post on the official Monero Reddit page published on Tuesday, April 9th stated that:
“We have, in collaboration with the Ledger team, successfully managed to recover the ‘lost’ funds of the users affected by the Ledger change output bug.”
According to the post, the bug was fixed by Monero developers luigi1111 and stoffu with the help of a team at Ledger. The bug was first discovered when a member of the Monero community reported that they had received funds to their XMR Ledger wallets but the funds were not reflected on their balances.
The scandal even led Kraken, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, to release a statement that stated its suspension of services with the Ledger XMR wallet.
The post mortem statement released yesterday revealed that:
“The bug was investigated by Ledger and described to both luigi1111 and stoffu. Fortunately, luigi1111 designed a concept that would allow one to retrieve the lost funds. Subsequently, stoffu created the required manual patch. Lastly, the Ledger team assisted the affected users with retrieving their funds.”
More than 1,680 XMR coins were thought have been lost, an equivalent of about $118,000 as of press time. The coders have resorted to audit and test any future code roll-outs more vigorously before releasing the code to the public for use.
This should take the format that rival hardware wallet takes when rolling out any code to their wallets. Trezor is more open source than Ledger is and this may have advised the adoption of such as strategy sooner.
According to the postmortem statement from yesterday, “this, hopefully, will ensure no such bugs will be present in the future.”
