Adding A Ledger Hardware Wallet To MetaMask

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Coinmonks

12 min readOct 12, 2022

I get asked on a daily basis “How Can I Add A Ledger Hardware Wallet to MetaMask”? This article seeks to answer that question for you.

You reach a point in defi where you suddenly have a couple of hundred thousand pounds of accounts on the go and you realise that MetaMask on its own might not be quite secure enough for your needs and also for you to be able to sleep soundly at night! I have 5 Drip wallets and 5 gardens on the go. Plus my Animal farm positions with Pigs and Dogs, Horde, Furio, EMP Money and Vapor Nodes. You name it. It’s a lot. This in-depth How too guide will hopefully answer that question for you in my typical step-by-step style and help you to secure your own wallets.

Let’s Dive in.

Ledger Hardware Wallet

For the purposes of this article, I am going to use one of my Old Ledger Hardware Wallet Nano S. I think I bought this one in 2017 around the time I was buying BTC at $3800 and people thought me a fool because they did not understand that you BUY when everyone else hates Crypto and you SELL when they all LOVE it. Regardless, this guide will be pretty much the same no matter which Ledger hardware wallet you may have. I am also going to make some assumptions.

1. MetaMask is installed and you are familiar with it as a wallet in your browser. If not please go and read my guide here on MetaMask.

2. You own a Ledger Hardware Wallet and have it in your hands. You can buy one from Ledger themselves if you do not have one already. Do Not buy from any third-party source! You can buy a Ledger by using the link below.

Migrating Your MetaMask Wallet into Your Ledger Hardware Wallet

When you have the above sorted out we are ready to make a start on migrating your existing MetaMask wallet where you have all your defi accounts into your Ledger Hardware Wallet. If you have not already written this down and stored it you need to open your MetaMask and write down your existing seed phrase. You can do this by going to MetaMask. Click on your account top right and then settings.

With MetaMask settings open you need to select Security & Privacy and then click on “Reveal Secret Recovery Phrase”

The system I use for storing all my various wallet secret phrases is excel. The excel template is filled out with all of my phrases. I then take it off my computer and store it on a Sandisk USB drive using Sandisk security. You can only get access to this USB stick if you know the 3-word password to unlock it. The USB stick is then hidden.

Make sure to go through all of the accounts within your MetaMask and note down the wallet addresses for each one. In my wallet for example I have 7 wallet (Accounts) addresses. Each one is named and each one has its own address. You will need these addresses later on when you connect your Ledger to MetaMask. These are mine.

AltT = 0x151xxxF5AB
Drip 1 = 0x061xxx3E810
Drip 2 = 0x321xxx68153
Drip 3 = 0x8C1xxxB2CDE
Drip 4 = 0xa8xxx70Be7f
Famous 5 = 0xEE8xxx0CDE8
Family = 0x7A8xxxF442B

Note them all down in notepad as you will need to refer to these later in the process.

What Do We Want To Achieve

What we are trying to achieve with our Ledger Hardware Wallet is as follows.

1. We want to Migrate our existing MetaMask wallet (The one with all your drip and animal farm type projects in it) into Ledger using this MetaMask wallet’s secret key.

2. Once migrated we then want to delete this MetaMask wallet from our computer so that the seed phrase is no longer stored on the computer itself.

3. Next we create a brand new MetaMask wallet on our computer with a new secret key seed phrase. This is our connection to the internet. I call mine “Hot Wallet”.

4. Then finally we connect our Ledger Hardware Wallet to this new MetaMask account and in so doing our Ledger is hidden behind the Hot Wallet.

That’s it in those four steps.

Adding Your MetaMask Secret Key To Ledger

Ok, let’s connect our Ledger Hardware Wallet to our PC. So firstly please connect your Ledger to your PC and you’ll see this message.

Scroll to the right on your Ledger using the top right button until you get to this screen Restore from recovery phrase.

The ledger will now ask you to choose a pin code. Press both of the top buttons together to start this process. Use the right button to scroll up through numbers and the left button to scroll down. Scroll through the numbers and when you get to the first one you want to press both buttons to select it. Repeat the same process for all the numbers in your pin code. I set a 4-digit pin code and when the little tick mark appears I press both buttons to create my pin code.

Your ledger will ask you to confirm the pin code by entering it again and pressing both buttons to confirm it. Once you have done this you will be asked to choose your Recovery phrase size. For MetaMask the phrase is 12 words so scroll to the right and select this one.

Now we have the laborious task of inputting every letter of each word into Ledger! You have to scroll for each letter and then select it with the double button press. If you make a mistake there is a little x that will delete the letter. Ledger is very good in that it will prompt words for you after you have entered a few letters. If the word is correct do the double button press to select it. Then enter word two. Continue this process until you have entered all the words.

After you have entered all the words Ledger will tell you it is processing and then jump to “Your device is now ready”

Downloading and Installing Ledger Live

Please go to Ledger and download Ledger Live so that we can connect our Ledger to our computer and ultimately to our MetaMask wallet. So go here to download Ledger Live. Always check the URL is correct and that you are indeed on the real Ledger site. Do NOT download Ledger from any other site than the official Ledger website.

When the download completes install it on your machine and then open it up. You now need to select “Get Started”

And then select your type of Nano. Mine is the Nano S so I shall select the first one.

As we have already entered our secret phrase into the Nano we can use this one here. Connect Your Nano.

Ledger Live will now want to connect to and check your Nano. So press on “Check my Nano”

On your Ledger, this message will pop up. Double-press the two buttons to accept the connection to Ledger Live.

If your Ledger is a Genuine one this message will pop up in Ledger Live.

Ledger Live main account screen will now load and in my case, it has detected that my Ledger is out of date and needs a firmware update. Proceed with the update if it needs one.

Downloading and Installing Firmware

Select the terms and check the box marked “I have my recovery phrase” and then proceed with the update.

The ledger will now download the update and install it.

During the process, Ledger will ask you to verify the key code on your Nano. Once again scroll right to verify the code and then unlock your Nano with the pin each time it is requested. The firmware process will then complete on your Ledger and you will end up back here.

Go to My Ledger and select Install APPS, Ok Ledger live connection to your Nano and then install the ETH app.

Once the ETH app is installed onto your ledger I want you to open up MetaMask and select “Connect Hardware Wallet”

This will open up a MetaMask browser window where you can select Ledger. Hit the blue continue button when it becomes active. Make sure the ETH app is open on your Ledger otherwise at this point you will get an error message. In Chrome, you will get a second popup window top left. Just select the device in this popup and press ok.

NOTE: You MUST have Ledger Live closed before you do this otherwise you might get error 0x650f You can read about this error here on MetaMask

Ledger Live will now open and ask if you want to connect via the bridge.

Select Open on this screen.

This will now pop up and ask you to select your accounts. Only the top one is mine so we need to change the HD path connection setting from Ledger Live to BIP44 standard.

After I changed to BIP44 all my accounts appeared. These are all the accounts I wrote down earlier. You can press next to see more as in my case I have 7.

That’s it for this stage. All you are doing is checking that your Ledger has those accounts on it and that they can be seen. We will now create a new MetaMask wallet in your browser.

Creating a New MetaMask Wallet and using Ledger with it

I now want you to open up your browser and delete your current MetaMask wallet from your machine. You do this by right-clicking the Fox icon and selecting remove from Chrome. It’s a similar process in the other browsers just make sure it is fully deleted.

What you are doing here is removing the seed phrase from the computer. Now if you get hacked the hacker will NOT be able to get access to your seed. You can follow my MetaMask guide and reinstall the MetaMask wallet in your browser. Always download from MetaMask themselves.

Create a NEW MetaMask Wallet with a NEW Seed Phrase

It is super important here to create a new wallet with a new seed phrase. DO NOT USE THE SEED PHRASE YOU USED ON YOUR LEDGER.

Create your new wallet. Note down the new seed phrase and add it to your sheet or however you choose to store your seed phrases. Pin the MetaMask wallet to the taskbar so you can see it. Now we are ready to connect our Ledger to this new MetaMask wallet.

Connecting Your Ledger To Your New MetaMask Hot Wallet

So where are we up to?

Added our old MetaMask wallet to our Ledger using its seed phrase
Connected our Ledger to our MetaMask and checked we can see all the accounts
Deleted the old MetaMask from our computer
Created a new MetaMask on our computer and stored the new seed phrase
Connect our Ledger to this new MetaMask and check we can perform some Defi transactions with it

So let’s continue again with connecting up our Ledger to our New MetaMask. Same steps that we followed above. Connect your Ledger to your computer and then open the ETH app again. Next, go to your NEW MetaMask and select Connect hardware wallet. Don’t forget again to change to BIP44 as the connection protocol. You can also add the networks to this new MetaMask wallet and tokens.

As this is a NEW MetaMask wallet that has not seen your Ledger before you will now be given the opportunity to open (unlock) the accounts that are stored on your Ledger.

I am only going to open the first account here but you can open them all and then they will all appear in your MetaMask. So put a tick and select Unlock. As you can see I only opened the first one.

Performing Transactions with Ledger and MetaMask

I have now unlocked my first Ledger account and it is visible in my new MetaMask. I can now go to Animal farm and plant my plants as normal which I will do now.

I’ve got 330000 to plant on this wallet from yesterday but I need to follow the instructions in the message that has popped up in MetaMask.

Go to your Ledger and make sure the ETH app is open. Scroll right in the ETH app until you see this message

Press both buttons to enable Blind Signing.

Go back to MetaMask and press the Confirm button on the transaction. We now have to check and confirm this transaction on your Ledger itself. You do this by scrolling right on your Ledger and checking each part of the transaction details until you get to Confirm or Reject at the end. Double press on Confirm and the transaction will go through.

Start at Review Transaction

Scroll to the right until you get to this message “Accept and Send” and then press both buttons.

Et Voila we have planted our plants. Even though every man and his dog are selling plants to buy pigs at the moment (or take $$$) I am not with any of my gardens or Drip for that matter. I am growing them so I am in a great position for when Drip pumps.

You’re done. You can do this also with Ledger Live open but for me, I don’t bother I just use Ledger Live to add tokens, check firmware etc.

Happy Defi

NOTE: Having your seed phrase on the ledger will stop one of the ways you can get hacked in crypto but there are others. Of course,

You should never give out your seed phrase to anyone.

I am NOT a financial advisor. Nothing in this article is to be construed as investment advice. You MUST DYOR (Do Your Own Research) Neither the author nor the publication takes any responsibility or liability for any investments, profits or losses you may incur as a result of this information. The article may contain affiliate links. Thank you for taking the time to read my article If you wish you can subscribe. My articles and guides are designed to help you to navigate the often confusing world that is Crypto.

Mark@AltT

Originally published at https://alttokenomics.com on October 12, 2022.

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