Driving Open-Source Development: Ledger App for EOS
A community maintenance plan for the Ledger app for EOS
The Ledger App for EOS was created as the result of an effort spearheaded by
, and developers , and . We’d also like to thank Technologies Inc. for the Ledger device itself. Each of these parties helped lay the groundwork that gave us a useable Ledger app for EOS. Without them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.EOS New York has been laying the groundwork for another initiative, the Transit API. The
is an open-source, community-maintained standard for connecting dApps with signature providers, an otherwise arduous task to do manually. See the original announcement here.Naturally, the work on Transit API has overlapped with the Ledger app for EOS.
The Ledger App for EOS Broke Last Week
In our work developing this standard alongside the likes of
, , and others, we discovered that Chrome had broken U2F support for Ledger on March 1st. If you updated your Chrome browser since then you may have noticed that the Ledger has simply stopped working. We contacted Ledger and Chrome developers, identified some issues, and began working on a fix. The Ledger team ultimately updated their SDK to adapt to the Chrome updates, but the Ledger app for EOS needed to be updated as well. As of this moment, Chrome devs have rolled back the update that broke the EOS app for Ledger but they’ve indicated they would be continuing with the update which broke it in the first place soon.Beyond simple usability and developer concerns, there are security concerns as well. Ledger released a new cryptography API, however, the current app is still hard-coded to use the old API. Ledger does not currently believe that this introduces security concerns, but it does mean that the EOS app does not benefit from any of the future fixes and enhancements.
Lastly, Ledger Nano X is soon to be released. The device does have some changes to the way the screen functions and may also require some changes to ensure that the EOS app functions correctly on the new device.
Evolving the Ledger app with the EOS Community
The Ledger app for EOS was a good start but it hasn’t evolved with the community. We want to stress this is no one’s fault or responsibility, but the EOS developer community continues to build around this application while it becomes increasingly fragile over time. The last pull request/merge for the Ledger app for EOS was on December 7th. How does the community maintain this important user tool moving forward?
We want to empower the EOS developer community to evolve the Ledger application for EOS in a semi-structured framework by doing the following:
- Raise community awareness
- Make it easy to contribute
- Create a stable release cycle and relationship with Ledger
What We’re Doing About It
EOS New York has hired a paid consultant who has deep experience with Ledger apps and currently helps to maintain a number of them. He has also contributed to the core Ledger SDK and has intimate knowledge of its behavior and inner-workings. We’ve directed this consultant to set up a test pipeline which allows developers to easily generate compiled binaries from a pull request. This pipeline will also provide tooling which allows you to easily push updates to a test environment on a Ledger for testing.
With a stable and open environment, we hope that the community will work with us to take control and maintain this important tool moving forward alongside Ledger Technologies Inc.
If you want to get involved with the Ledger development please log any issues or improvements here. If you would like to start building a Transit API plugin for your wallet or integrate Transit API into your dApp to seamlessly support multiple signature providers/wallets please visit the Transit API website at or join the Transit API developer community.
Be sure to sign up for our weekly newsletter, the EOS Echo, for everything going on in the EOS ecosystem.
