Ledger review: the most available wallet in New Zealand

The two data breaches, and what they actually mean

This is the part of the Ledger story most reviews either ignore or overstate, so we want to be precise. Neither incident involved a private key, a recovery phrase, or any cryptographic material. Both involved customer records, and the consequence was physical rather than digital.

In July 2020, an unauthorised party accessed Ledger's e-commerce and marketing database through a third-party API on the company's website. Approximately 270,000 customers had names, email addresses, phone numbers and physical postal addresses exposed, along with more than a million email addresses. The data was sold privately and then dumped publicly in December 2020.

What followed is why it belongs in a security review. Ledger reported shutting down 171 phishing sites in the two months after the leak. Customers received extortion letters demanding US$700 to US$1,000 in Bitcoin under threat of doxxing or physical harm. And in 2021, some owners received unsolicited counterfeit Ledger devices in the post, physically modified so that connecting one to a computer would install malware. A list of verified home addresses belonging to people known to hold cryptocurrency is a uniquely valuable asset to a certain kind of criminal, and no amount of chip certification protects against someone knocking on your door.

Then, on 5 January 2026, Ledger disclosed a second exposure. A misconfigured API key on the Ledger website allowed unauthorised access to a cloud system at Global-e, the third-party payment processor acting as merchant of record for some Ledger.com purchases. Names, email addresses, postal addresses and phone numbers of affected customers were exposed. No payment information, credentials or recovery phrases were involved, and neither Ledger nor Global-e has disclosed how many people were affected.

Our conclusion is narrow and specific: buy Ledger hardware, but do not buy it from Ledger. GROOV in Christchurch is an authorised reseller importing directly from Ledger France, dispatching within 24 business hours for one to three day New Zealand delivery. PB Tech and Mighty Ape stock the entry models. All of them keep your street address in a New Zealand company's system rather than an offshore retailer's, and all of them bring you under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, which a direct import does not.

The closed-firmware question, fairly stated

Ledger's critics reduce this to "closed source, therefore untrustworthy", and that is too glib. The actual position is more interesting.

Certified secure elements generally come with non-disclosure obligations from the chip manufacturer, which historically forced hardware wallet makers to choose between a strongly protected chip and fully publishable firmware. Ledger chose the chip. Its argument is that an EAL6+ certified secure element, combined with Ledger Donjon — a genuine in-house attack laboratory — produces more real-world security than public review of a device built on a weaker microcontroller. Donjon's output supports that claim: it was Donjon researcher Baptiste Boileau who found and responsibly disclosed the laser fault-injection attack against Tangem's cards in 2026, notifying Tangem in February and publishing five months later.

The counter-argument is that this is unfalsifiable from the outside. You cannot verify that the device runs what Ledger says it runs, you cannot audit the code path that handles your seed, and the Ledger Recover episode showed that firmware capabilities can turn out to be broader than users assumed. Trezor has since demonstrated that the trade-off is not absolute — the Safe line pairs open firmware with an EAL6+ secure element, and the Safe 7 goes further by layering the auditable TROPIC01 chip alongside an Infineon Optiga element and a separate microcontroller.

Where we land: this is a legitimate philosophical disagreement between two competent vendors, not a case of one being safe and the other not. If you have no strong view, choose open firmware, because it is the decision you are least likely to regret and it costs you very little. If you already own a Ledger, there is no reason to replace it — change your assumptions about the privacy of your shipping address, not your hardware.

Buying and using a Ledger in New Zealand

Ledger is the one brand where New Zealand availability is genuinely good, which is worth 9.2 on our local-supply axis and materially affects the overall grade.

GROOV, based in Scarborough, Christchurch, is an authorised reseller importing new sealed stock directly from Ledger France. At our last check it listed the Nano S Plus at NZ$99, Nano X at NZ$199, Nano Gen5 at NZ$349, Flex at NZ$485 and Stax at NZ$779, with Afterpay and Zip available alongside the usual cards and wallets. Stock rotates and several models showed as sold out, so check before planning around a specific device. PB Tech, Mighty Ape and Computer Lounge carry the entry models in the NZ$95 to NZ$120 range with next-day delivery to most urban addresses.

On arrival, do three things. Let the device generate its own recovery phrase — if a phrase arrives pre-written, the wallet is not yours. Run Ledger Live's genuineness check, which verifies cryptographically rather than by looking at a sticker. Then wipe the device and restore it from your handwritten words before you put a single dollar on it. Full process in our cold storage guide.