Seed Incompatiblity bug with Cardano wallets

A seed should always restore the same wallet, no matter if you use Daedalus, Ledger, Trezor, AdaLite, Exodus or Yoroi.

Right now this is NOT the case. Ledger and Trezor are using a different derivation path for key generation. You can’t access your funds without a working Ledger/Trezor device. This is just in emergency situations important. But it’s a bug and end user will loose trust in the system!

The competitor have this compatibility: It works perfect with every HW/SW Ethereum-wallet.

Please support my IOHK proposal, if you agree:
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Seed-incompatibility/357850-48088

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Yes, this is a problem - I agree.

I believe it is because Daedalus, ADALite, Yoroi use a different elliptic curve algorithm than Ledger, Trezor. Unless I’m mistaken, you’d need to get all wallet impls on board to use the same algorithm going forward and doing so breaking backward compatibility. i.e. old mnemonics will no longer work with the new scheme, which actually might create an even greater confusion.

I think, my solution proposal would work, because only Ledger and Trezor are “the bad guys”. They would have to change their code and it can be done totally backward compatible without too much effort.

Nothing would break and the standard seed handling for Cardano would be accomplished.

I tried to talk to Ledger/Trezor but as an end user I’m stuck with their support people, hoping it gets through to the developers.

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I agree that this is a problem, and maintaining compatibility with old wallets does significantly complicate the situation.

BTW, Trezor Model T and Ledger Nano X actually do use the standard derivation paths. However, Trezor uses a different number of seed words by default than Daedalus, and Ledger derives the root private key from the seed differently than Daedalus. There is enough (scattered) documentation to recover such wallets without the hardware in an emergency, but it is a somewhat complicated process.

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The end user would be lost in such an emergency situation. Why not clean up the mess in Trezor/Ledger and come back to a standard as with Ethereum?

Please support my proposal. Or, if you’re a developer, maybe you can better explain the situation and suggested solution to the right people. For Cardano Governance in the world financial system, it has to be flawlesss, safe and easy to handle in all situations.

I tried to think it through, but so far, I believe my proposal would maintain full compatibility with old wallets. The changes only need to be done inside Trezor/Ledger. Every other Cardano-SW-wallet is fine.

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Yes, I decidedly support the proposal. I think that all of the Cardano wallets would benefit from improved usability and safety, especially in light of the pending advent of smart contracts.

Thanks for your vote. I don’t like the idea that BNB would win the race, but I have to admit when comparing Trust Wallet to smart-phone-Yoroi, they have a much better user interface.

On my smart phone Yoroi looks primitive and a new end user is still confronted with the choice to create a Byron or a Shelly wallet, the fingerprint login mechanism is visible, but disabled,… and, and…

With all the hard work done on the back end of Cardano, the user interface and usability seems to be forgotten. Look at the history: Microsoft Windows gained leadership in the PC market because it looked nice to the end user, and had (has) a terrible unstructred OS underlying.

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I’m new to this space too. Have a NanoS and have found it impossible to get ADALite onto the NanoS despite lots of “help” from support,
When I first got the Nano several weeks ago I put all my XRP in it no trouble. 2 weeks ago tried to send XRP to my wallet but it timed out and was cancelled. “help” was no help.
So far I’m not too impressed with this product or it’s support.

Please write to Ledger (as I did), to get full seed compatiblity on all platforms. The more complaints, the better, the faster they do a fix for this bug.

I would recommend to use the Yoroi Browser Extension instead of ADALite. Personally, I think it’s better, especially for staking selection. But they both do the job.

Both wallets can only hold ADA, not XRP. Ledger Live is a Multi-Coin-Wallet for everything else, but has no native support for ADA. Therefore you need ADALite or Yoroi in addition to your Nano S. That needs to be changed too, Please write a complain to Ledger customer support.

Thanks for your comment. Please help to make ADA (or XRP?) to become the next world financial system!

I think the problem is the calculation from the Seed Phrase to the Master Root Key, as described here:

Swapping from ledger to Trezor - #8 by skyrmion

Unfortunately I do not find the original post by @SebastienGllmt anymore.

It could be, that the CIP3/Icarus way is better than BIP39 (more iterations of the PBKDF2 function), but it is non-standard and causes a lot of incompatibility issues.

Thanks for your comment. I’m just an end user, and from my perspective the whole issue is just disturbing. I understand that under the hood things are complicated, but:

Why do Ledger/Trezor do not fix this bug? My IOHK proposal (first post here) would not break anything.

With ERC20-Wallets everything is fine and compatible. Cardano is behind the competitors!

You seem to be much deeper and professional into the whole subject. Could you please get in contact with the developers at Ledger/Trezor and support them, to get things fixed? Thanks!

For Ada to become the next standard in the world financial system everything must be safe, flawless and easy. I don’t like the idea to pay my bills with BNBs in a few years…

Thank you! But unfortunately I am not so much deeper in the topic. I only had a look at the CIP3.

The issue is, that it is not a bug. There are simply different standards followed by these wallets.

But at the moment, I am still not really sure if I am interpreting the standards correctly. It is still an assumption, to be confirmed by some developers.

I think people with the required knowledge are present in this forum, and they know the topic. It would be highly appreciated, if they could confirm or correct our statements, and give some hints on planned or not planned potential changes.

I consider that a slight security advantage. If my hw wallet seed gets compromised, it restores to an empty sw wallet.

I agree with you, but look at it from the end user perspective:
Imagine, you have 100,000 Ada in your Ledger-Wallet (Daedalus, Yoroi,…), and the Ledger breaks for any reason, or some USB-connection problem,…

It takes at least 2 weeks (actually) to get a new Ledger. So if you get a Trezor-T faster, you’re screwed again: Ledger and Trezor are totally compatible with ERC20 but NOT with Cardano. Result: empty wallet.

A lot of unncessary heart attacks will happen in such an emergency situation. This news will spread and BNB will rule the financial world… - a nightmare.

So accessing your funds is totally dependent on Ledger AND your seed. A seed should be independent on any HW/SW-wallet, even with the price of a little security disadvantage.

Please vote for my proposal and write a note to Ledger/Trezor-support (as I did), to emphasize attention to this problem. How is your ROS? Maybe I stake with your pool. Thanks!

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