As Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX faces bankruptcy, users are scrambling to move cryptocurrency to cold wallets like Ledger and Trezor — but due to a sudden surge in traffic, Ledger experienced ‘downgraded server performance’ which left users unable to send or withdraw funds.
Ledger chief tech officer Charles Guillemet told Cointelegraph that since users often leave devices alone for long periods of time, the amount of users needing to upgrade software on Wednesday led to an “unusual load on the device manager service.”
“After the FTX earthquake, there’s a massive outflow from exchanges to Ledger security and self sovereignty solutions,” he tweeted.
Ledger’s poor word choice
Two hours later, the cold wallet storage provider said its server outage had been patched up. But users were concerned by the language used when it first announced the outage.
“Your assets are safe and a fix will be deployed when we’ve identified the root cause,” Ledger had tweeted.
“What do you mean by assets are safe? Isn’t that obvious?” one user replied, (our emphasis).
“Everyone knows how Ledger works, but using ‘your assets are safe’ is terrible timing,” another comment read.
Right before FTX announced Binance would acquire the exchange — a non-binding deal that has since fallen through — its founder Bankman-Fried reassured the public that “assets are fine.”
