Ledger Nano X review: Safe from prying eyes

If you are serious to own digital currencies, you need a hardware wallet. Just as the wallet in your pocket stores physical currency, a crypto wallet stores your digital currency. It keeps it safe from hackers but conveniently available when you need it. When it comes to wallets, the Ledger Nano X strikes a good balance between simplicity and security. Although it is beginner friendly, it offers a high level of security in an offline wallet.

When you buy digital currency, you are not buying a physical item. There is no coin or note, as you have with traditional currencies. When you buy a cryptocurrency, you are actually buying a public and private key pair, both cryptographically generated on the blockchain. These keys are unique. The private key unlocks the publicly stored part of the blockchain, which you can then use anywhere that takes the currency.

This is hard for most of us to wrap our heads around, so we tend to buy and store our digital currencies on exchanges like Coinbase. But the problem is that we don’t have the private keys to that money. Without private keys, you don’t really control it. At the same time, if you have the keys, you need to keep them securely locked away and not just stored on a hard drive. This is where the Nano X comes in.

What you actually own

If you buy crypto through an exchange or brokerage, like Coinbase or Kraken, it stores your private keys for you. A crypto brokerage is conceptually similar to a bank, but with some very important differences – notably that your crypto broker is not insured by the federal government.

In this scenario, you are at the mercy of the prey. If the exchange is hacked and your private key is stolen, you are out of luck (and money). Exchanges also sometimes disappear overnight, whether they declare bankruptcy or the founders decide to skip town with everyone’s digital currency. All this and more has happened, repeatedly. The simple truth is that if you don’t have your private key stored on a hardware device under your control, you don’t really own any crypto.

Ledger Nano X is a secure hardware wallet that stores your private keys. It looks like a rotatable USB stick, with a small screen on the front, mostly because it is a USB stick with a screen on the front.

Only buy Nano X directly from Ledger. Any other source could potentially be compromised. The Nano X is available on Amazon, from what appears to be a legitimate Ledger storefront, but I still recommend buying directly from Ledger. The company offers free shipping, so there is absolutely nothing to gain from buying from Amazon, and you introduce significant risk by doing so.

When it first arrives, the first thing your Ledger Nano X will do is walk you through the download of its companion app, Ledger Live. There are versions available for just about every platform, and I tested it on Linux. Once you’ve installed the app, you connect to the Nano X and the app will walk you through a few questions designed to make sure your device hasn’t been tampered with on its way to you. If anything seems fishy, ​​stop and contact Ledger.

Assuming everything checks out, the next step is to generate a 24-word “seed” phrase, which is really just some random words. This is what Nano X uses to protect and lock your private cryptocurrency keys. The Ledger app makes generating the seed phrase easy and even forces you to double check and verify it. This is the most important part of your Nano X. Don’t miss that sentence. If you have significant amounts of money on your Nano X, I strongly recommend putting a copy of this seed phrase in a safe deposit box or similar safe location.

Back and forth

Once your Nano is set up, it’s time to move your cryptocurrency out of any exchange accounts you’ve been using. To do this, you use the Ledger Live app to set up an “account” for each currency you own. This creates a public key to send your cryptocurrency to.