Funds stuck on Ledger
Man I’m so done with Ledger…
What many people aren’t aware of is Ledger stores certain cryptocurrencies in an abnormal manner, leading to strange derivation paths that practically no other wallet recognises.
Think about the ramifications of that: NO other wallet is able to detect certain funds you store on Ledger, EVEN if you follow the nuclear option of entering your seed phrase in an emergency.
This happened to me with ZEC (ZCash) and ADA (Cardano); when ZEC’s price underwent a miraculous spike, I had to quickly sell my substantial funds. However, Ledger had basically stored my ZEC funds deposited months ago in a strange way and had lost the ability to control them. I literally could not move my ZEC funds on Ledger at all, and this was quite a known issue in the ZCash community.
I tried everything, from my phone to MacBook to desktop to connecting to popular wallets, Ledger was unable to move my funds and no other wallet could detect them. I even went down the risky path of extracting my ZEC private key from Ian Coleman’s offline BIP39 tool, yet wallets simply wouldn’t detect my funds.
At that point I literally had no option; hours had passed by and I just couldn’t move my funds. I decided to enter my seed phrase into a hot wallet and I could finally move my ZEC funds.
Though the process was greatly irritating, at least entering my seed phrase allowed me to control my ZEC. The same can’t be said of ADA; I entered my seed phrase into every wallet I could think of, including ADA-specific ones. Not a single one of them could detect my ADA funds.
To this day, my ADA funds can’t be controlled and I’ve ran out of options. Remember, this is all due to Ledger’s derivation paths.
I’m writing this just to let you know that relying on Ledger is a grave mistake; I’d thought that storing my funds there is a good idea, but apparently not. What is to be done?