Onchain investigator ZachXBT posted a blunt takedown of hardware wallets on Telegram, calling them “complete garbage”. He advises against using them to sign transactions or store meaningful funds, and recommends a dedicated iPhone instead. Ledger draws his sharpest criticism, after a first half of 2026 filled with scams built around its products.
Key Takeaways
- ZachXBT advises against hardware wallets for signing and storage
- Ledger singled out for updates that break basic functions
- He recommends a dedicated iPhone as a signing device
A Telegram Post With No Hedging
The wording leaves nothing to interpretation. In a Telegram post, ZachXBT wrote that all hardware wallets are “complete garbage” and that he does not advise using them for important tasks like signing transactions or storing funds.
The weight comes from the messenger. The investigator built his reputation by publicly tracing stolen funds, including cases like the Kelp DAO hack and its $292M in losses. When he talks security, the industry listens, because his channel doubles as an early-warning system for exchanges and victims alike.
The framing condemns the whole category, not one brand. Every device is declared unfit for critical tasks, from long-term storage to everyday signing. The complaint is functional before it is technical.
His argument is not about the chips inside hardware wallets. ZachXBT did not identify a new hardware vulnerability and did not claim every device shares the same technical weaknesses. The software layer is what he is attacking, not a demonstrated break of secure-element hardware.
Ledger’s Updates and Six Months of Scams
The French market leader takes the hardest hits. ZachXBT argues that Ledger Live receives regular UI and app updates “for no good reason” that end up breaking simple actions right where users sign.
The timing stings. Ledger explains in its official note on renaming Ledger Live to Ledger Wallet that buying, swapping, staking and yield now live inside one app. Critics counter that every added integration widens the attack surface and raises the odds of regressions in signing flows.
The business logic of the revamp is obvious. Turning a signing utility into a services platform generates recurring revenue. The security logic is more contested, since a wallet app gets harder to audit with every feature it swallows. That tension predates this post, but the post makes it unavoidable.
The dollar math explains the nerves. Between one cloned app and the manipulation of a single holder, more than $291M left custody in six months without a device ever being cracked, and Ledger’s name sits next to most of those headlines.
The first half of 2026 supplies the ammunition. In April, a fraudulent Ledger Live clone on Apple’s App Store drained roughly $9.5M, including funds belonging to musician G. Love. In January, a single victim lost more than $282M in Bitcoin and Litecoin to a social engineering scam. Most of these attacks exploited the human layer around the device, a pattern also seen in the $32M Humanity Protocol token hack in June.
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A Dedicated iPhone as the Signing Device
His alternative is disarmingly simple. ZachXBT recommends a dedicated iPhone as a signing device, which he considers more secure than traditional hardware wallets for everyday use.
That flips a decade of received wisdom. The specialized device was sold as the top of the security pyramid, and one of the industry’s most listened-to investigators now prefers a mass-market smartphone, as long as it does nothing else.
The reasoning rests on a simple observation. Recent losses did not come from broken chips but from deceived humans, through a cloned app or a social engineering play. A locked-down, single-purpose consumer device shrinks exactly that daily exposure surface.
It is advice, not an audit. The post names no new exploit and publishes no proof of concept, which is exactly why it stings. The argument stands on incidents everyone already watched happen this year.
Near term, the post lands maximum image damage on Ledger mid-rollout of its new app. Further out, it may push manufacturers toward a stripped-down signing stack, since fewer moving parts in the signing path would blunt the critique faster than any rebuttal. The personal custody debate just reopened.
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