Hardware wallet industry has encountered issues again. As the absolute leader in the global cold wallet market, Ledger recently faced a problem in the payment chain — its third-party payment processor Global-e experienced a data breach, and some users' personal information was accessed illegally.

Once this news spread, the crypto community immediately went into an uproar. The reason is simple: Ledger has always been promoted as a more secure asset management solution than hot wallets and centralized exchanges. Users trust it because of the logic of storing private keys offline. Any security-related incident can shake user confidence.

Ledger officially confirmed this matter afterward — the system of partner Global-e was indeed illegally accessed, and order data was leaked. In this process, Global-e acts as a nominal merchant handling cross-border transactions on the official website, serving as an intermediary in the payment process.

The pressing question now is: are users' private keys and funds truly safe? From a technical perspective, since private keys are stored offline on hardware devices, theoretically this leak should not affect the assets themselves. However, the leakage of personal information is a serious issue — order data usually contains users' real identities, addresses, purchase records, and other sensitive information. If this information falls into the wrong hands, the subsequent risks are unpredictable.

This incident also serves as a reminder to the entire industry: even if your core technology is robust, any problem in the supply chain can cause trouble for users. hardware wallet manufacturers need to scrutinize each partner’s security measures more strictly than others.