Ledger hardware wallet alternatives.

I have been trying to find a replacement for my current hardware wallet provider which is Ledger Nano. Ledger has introduced their KYC custodial service to restore your seed phrase but that alternative could open vulnerabilities to current users who don't wish to use that service because for that service to work you need to be able to extract the secret from the hardware device which exposes the device to future attack vectors.

So the alternative is to find a better wallet and one to which you don't have to subscribe to such services and another that doesn't add such features to current users.

AirGap Vault was the first alternative since it is free and you only need a new or used device that never connects to the internet, and that only uses the cameras when signing transactions. If you use BTC and ETH, AirGap will be a good alternative because those two cryptocurrencies as well-supported. I must add you can use AirGap Vault together with Rabbit and Metamask.

When it comes to altcoins like Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, and many others unfortunately AirGap doesn't support that many altcoins, and they declared two years ago they are not adding Bitcoin fork support at the moment because there is a risk an attacker could trick users into signing a Bitcoin fork transaction but in reality they are trying to drain a Bitcoin wallet.

It appears Ledger Recovers will only work with the newer version of their hardware wallets and the Ledger Nano S won't be compatible with this new service. That could mean users who are holding old hardware wallets could be safe because they won't receive such firmware updates and as such won't have a possible backdoor in their firmware devices.

In the future Ledger could add support for Ledger Nano S devices and as such introduce that bug into older wallets as well, and they could also secretly introduce that feature on future firmware updates if it is not already part of current firmware, is just that they haven't told us yet.

The alternatives are to continue using Ledger Nano S without upgrading the firmware from now on at least. At the same time, other better wallets come to the public but also while users find new alternatives that fit their use case.

You could also use AirGap Vault for Bitcoin Cash but only as a read-only wallet, let me explain, AirGap supports Bitcoin legacy, which means you can use Bitcoin legacy as your Bitcoin Cash wallet, just to receive funds, but the moment you want to use your money you will have to restore that wallet into a hot wallet that will be connected to the internet. Using AirGap with legacy addresses also probably means you won't be using CashTokens just in case the legacy format changes in the future for BCH.

AirGap for Bitcoin Cash will be like a paper wallet the moment you need to use your funds you must go online and as such you will need to create another private key, you can create private keys on your AirGap Vault and import them to Electron Cash once you need to use your funds.

You can still use DeFi EVM solutions like BNB and sBCH because you can connect Rabbit and Metamask and they will work fine.

In my case, I will be using AirGap Vault for BTC and ETH, also for SmartBCH since I have full support for it using Rabbit wallet. But for Bitcoin Cash, I will send funds to my AirGap and use Electron Cash once I want to use my BCH. I could also use Electron Cash on mobile as a hot wallet for small transactions.

I won't take any chances with Ledger because I don't know if Ledger Nano S devices are already compromised with that Ledger Recovery tool so I am migrating to the solution I exposed today.

If you are a Ledger users, What are you going to do? Please leave it in the comment sections.

Update.
It seems at this point the only solution is to migrate outside of any Ledger product.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/05/18/ledger-continues-to-defend-recovery-system-says-its-always-technically-possible-to-extract-users-keys/?outputType=amp

I wonder if the Bitcoin Cash community could reach out to AirGap Vault and AirGap Wallet to add Bitcoin Cash to their list of applications that way users don't have to implement a workaround like the one I will be using.