Users of Ledger hardware wallets have taken to popular social news forum Reddit to voice complaints about a sudden lack of functionality with Bitcoin Cash. According to reports, many Ledger owneres are struggling to transact with BCH whilst others can’t even see their balance at all.
Ledger’s Bitcoin Cash Users Worry About Two Day Outage
Not surprisingly, those Ledger hardware wallet users who want to store Bitcoin’s most popular hard fork to date are starting to freak out. Many have taken to Reddit for answers. One post to the official Ledger subreddit read:
“I recently trasfered all my BTC, ETH, and LTC from coinbase to my Nano S. This all went fine. However when I tried to send my BCH, the transfer went through but the balance is still 0 on the ledger wallet. I selected ” Main” and scan the QT Code to receive the funds. Did I do something wrong? It has been over 36 hours now.”
Ledger have been rather quiet publicly about the sudden loss of service. The company has not Tweeted any updates and according to The Next Web, the CTO of Ledger, Nicolas Bacca responded to concerned Reddit users with a rather flippant:
“The team is still investigating. I’m not following this closely.”
Ledger’s official website does, however, have an “active incident” report that is hidden away in its wallet status report section. According to the live feed of updates from the page, the fault was identified as being an issue with the “new version of Bitcoin-ABC (Bitcoin Cash node).”
The feed stated at 7AM UTC yesterday that there had been a compatibility problem with the new version and that the Ledger team were working towards a solution. They continued to state that users’ funds were safe and that transactions were still possible. The company recommended using the software wallet Electron Cash to access funds that needed to be used immediately.
There was then no further update until 7:46AM today. At that time, it was initially stated that the fix was underway and full functionality would resume for BCH wallets “in the coming hours”. This was updated four and a half hours later with the following message:
“The resync of the nodes may take more time than expected. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will post an update when we have a more precise ETA.”
There was then more radio silence until around 4:04PM. The next update stated that accessing Bitcoin Cash would remain impossible “until we have found the root cause”.
It now appears that the problem has been properly identified and a fix is underway. According to the company, the blockchain is currently syncing. It should be finished around midnight tonight (UTC). It remains to be seen whether it will be successful.
The company’s quiet public stance is likely a deliberate move to avoid freaking out users who are yet to notice the BCH downtime. Despite some minor security issues facing Ledger products recently, the company were still surprisingly named as the top holiday gift in the entire state of Nevada over Easter. With so many new customers, they’ll surely want to avoid tarnishing their reputation at all costs.